Exploring the incredible photographs of a Japanese love hotel researcher

Have you ever seen (or stayed at) a love hotel like this?

Though the cyberpunk (is that the right descriptor?) style is like something out of a Neo Tokyo landscape or cut from the same cloth as the Robot Restaurant in Kabukicho, it is actually a room in an Okayama hotel with a retro fairground and amusement park theme.

As fans know, the most outrageous and unusual love hotels are to be found not in cities but deep in the countryside.

Saying that, if you are into BDSM and dungeons, there is this love hotel in Asabu, Minato ward, that has been running for four decades.

The images were shared on Twitter by “love hotel researcher Oni,” a 1989-born female photographer whose work focuses on unusual love hotels designed in the 1960s and 1970s. You can find more on her awesome website. She already published two books about love hotels.

Oni also recently highlighted a hotel with a UFO-themed bed, which is certainly a new take on the mile-high club.

Some, like the incredible Gaia hotel in Chiba, are now sadly closed and abandoned but many are still open.

We could spend hours perusing her website and sharing more examples here. Unfortunately, we have to earn an honest yen.

Love hotels in urban areas have been hit hard by measures taken to combat COVID-19 and many were temporarily closed. As such, these photos may well be the closest we will get to visiting a hotel for a while. Saying that, with the state of emergency now lifted in Japan, they should at least start to reopen, and suburban hotels actually seemed to experience a surge in demand from horny folks in lockdown.