In Japan, there is a designated time and place for most everything, love included. A stolen kiss in a restaurant or bar is sure to draw a disapproving glance. Affection has its proper setting: in one-hour increments in themed hotels, perhaps shaped like a pirate ship and with a neon entrance sign. Today there are 37,000 such establishments across the country. They are known as “love hotels.”
The concept dates back to the Edo period (1603–1868), when the capital’s densely packed wooden buildings concealed discreet inns called kashi-zashiki. The entrances were often tucked into alleyways, and exits were reached through tunnels, allowing paramours to avoid detection.
After the Second World War, women in short skirts loitered around army bases, looking for U.S. soldiers who could pay. It was the era of the auto boom; cars roared across the country, and roadside motels flourished. When, in 1958, Japan outlawed sex for money, the trade moved underground. Edo-era inns rebranded themselves as tsurekomi yado (bring-along inns) and offered rooms by the hour.
As urban apartments grew smaller, so small that even married couples had little privacy, the demand for these quickie rentals soared. By 1961, Tokyo alone had 2,700 love hotels. In the 70s, the inns got imaginative. Tokyo’s Hotel Meguro Emperor, built in 1973, featured soundproof bedrooms and castle-like turrets. A wave of hotels with anime-inspired themes soon spread across the country. Meanwhile, elaborate payment systems ensured discretion. Guests slipped bills into vending machines or pneumatic tubes, or handed them to masked staff hidden behind frosted glass.
In 2023, the Paris-based photographer François Prost traveled across Japan to document these strange palaces of forbidden love, 90 percent of which were owned by women. From Tokyo to Shikoku Island, he captured them all: a whale-shaped hotel with painted teeth in Okayama, the space-age Hotel UFO in Chiba, and the candy-clad Sweets Hotel in Machida.
Now collected in Prost’s new book, Love Hotel, the photographs reveal a facet of Japan at odds with its artful self-presentation—as if buildings with crumbling paint and gaudy backdrops are the only places to let loose from repression. A line by Milan Kundera comes to mind: “Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.” —Elena Clavarino
Love Hotel will be published on March 20 by Fisheye Éditions
Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at air mail
