Girls just wanna have fun -- and have fun alone if needs be. It's well known that love hotels are sometimes used in lieu of regular accommodation when other hotels are booked up or because the cost is basically the same. There has been a recent spike, for example, among foreign tourists using them (sometimes by accident) as well as businessmen. Does that mean a woman could stay overnight at a love hotel alone? In theory, yes. But would they want to? One Japanese woman recently set out to investigate the merits of such a scenario. She was much more prepared than most: she ...

Once again we have been trawling some of Japan's postwar history for insights about the sexual development of the nation. Here are some awesome vintage images of classic love hotels. Fans of love hotels and this blog will immediately spot that this one is the Meguro Emperor, a pioneering love hotel from the 1970s that has since re-opened. The other two are, apparently, the Ichinomiya London and Olympia hotels. It was around this time that love hotels started to become very elaborate, adding castle-style "battlements" and turrets. The results are bizarre, lurid and wacky, ...

It is said that half of all sex in Japan happens in a love hotel. 1% of the population uses a love hotel on any single day; something like 1,370,000 couples. A large proportion of the nation's new babies are conceived in a love hotel. There are 500 million visits a year. Room occupancy is 600-700% in some busy establishments -- 78.8 stays per room per month! The love hotel industry has an annual turnover of ¥4 trillion yen, which is around four times the operating profits of Toyota and double the anime industry. And yet it's cars and anime that the government wants to push as the face ...

We've just heard of this new documentary which takes a look at one of our favorite places, the love hotel. While we don't like the preview's slightly cheap pandering to exoticism and stereotypes about Japan ("in a society where conformity is everything and public affection cannot be shown..." -- really?) that just aren't the whole truth, we shouldn't judge it solely by the trailer. The visuals are interesting, at any rate, promising some nice kinky scenes of S&M inside a love hotel room, by the looks of things. Check out the nurse asking her "patient" if his cock has a ...