
A Japanese Love Hotel - stuffedolives
https://roadsandkingdoms.com/2019/japanese-love-hotels-toko-sekiguchi/
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jerkstate
These are big in Korea too, and the purpose isn't just infidelity as the
article would have you believe. It is common to live with your family until
marriage, and many Korean families outwardly hold traditional values of
chastity until marriage. Families also tend to have a greater financial
involvement (and therefore more influence over) in their childrens ability to
rent a nice place because of jeonsei (very high security deposit - like a
downpayment - in exchange for reduced rent), so it is in adult childrens best
interest to keep up appearances with their parents. The average marriage age
is 32 for women, 35 for men. So this means many, many years of adulthood
dating where you cannot bring home a date to sleep with because you live with
your parents. So love hotels are common in Korean nightlife districts and they
are actually quite nice and cheap too. I stayed at some of them years ago and
I recall they were around $75 per night, with free pirated DVD movies to
borrow.

~~~
rangerpolitic
I took a teaching position back in the mid-00s in Korea. Because it was a new
school, the housing wasn't ready when we arrived. The school decided to put us
up in one because it was cheap. We were there for a month.

Nice? That's not the word I would choose. Random stains on the furniture and
carpet. Hairs on the sheets. A vending machine at the end of the hall selling
an assortment of toys.

They did have free pirated DVDs on a shelf at the end of the hall. It was all
porn.

It did have fantastic sound effects at 2 AM in the morning, though.

Nice is definitely not the word I would choose based on my experience.

~~~
rlue
The place your school put you up in probably didn't charge US$75/night. In my
experience (in Taiwan), many decent, modern hotels offer 2- to 4-hour couples
packages just to tap that extra segment of the market.

In addition to those, there are definitely seedy places where you can get a
room for 3 hours for around US$15.

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LarryL
I'm french, and live in France, near Paris.

In France, there is only (AFAIK) _one_ love hotel (inspired by the japanese
ones).

It's pretty small and the rooms are not big at all, but okayish (I only
visited once).

What's interesting is the history of its creation: from what I've read, it was
pretty hard to get the authorizations (which explains why there are not any
others). Basically, this is the old B.S. about prostitution. Which is total
hogwash because they check your ID when you go in, so it would be impossible
for an escort to use it with more than a couple customers (and regular hotels
are frequently used for escorting anyway so what's the difference?).

Personally, I think that love hotels are a great thing, much better than a
regular hotel, and MANY people would benefit from those. Especially people in
alternative sexualities (like myself) for whom finding a place to have sex is
often a serious problem: going to one partner's home is often seen as a risk
for security & anonymity.

BTW, there has also been recently (one year ago), the opening of a "sex doll
brothel" in Paris, and they were also checked by the police... Seriously, a
freaking SEX DOLL hotel! It's crazy how anything related to sex in any way
creates so much problems.

~~~
dayvid
Sadly, I don't think love hotels would work in America. Too many people
disrespect and trash public spaces. It's the same reason they don't have net
cafes like they do in Japan (where you can informally crash and use the
internet).

~~~
andrewflnr
I don't know exactly how common they were, but I've definitely been to an
internet café in the US (in a very small town FWIW). AFAICT they're gone
because they just don't make economic sense anymore with everyone having a
WiFi device already.

~~~
Noumenon72
Also, public libraries have expanded into the space, using taxpayer dollars to
provide the same service for free. Very entrepreneurial of them.

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miohtama
If you need a hotel in Tokyo you can get a good deal on these love hotels
compared to big name hotels. You do not need to go there for sex. They are
available on hotels.com and bookings.com and such.

The rooms are good size (in Tokyo hotel rooms tend to be small), you get a
very luxurious bath room and bath utilities, you can order a tons of food
through TV and of course you get some free condoms.

Do not expect amazing lobby, though. Entrances are more hole-in-a-wall style.

Locals seem to have a cultural taboo with these hotels, but as a Western
traveler it is a pleasant and fun experience.

~~~
jpatokal
There are a couple of catches to using love hotels as regular hotels though:

* If you want a "stay" (overnight) instead of a "rest" (hourly), check-in times are late and check-out times are early, with steep hourly rates slapped on top if you overstay

* It's often not possible to leave the room and come back (insert joke about in-and-out privileges here)

* Rooms are often windowless

All that said, they can be great deal. Here's a mildly tongue-in-cheek
comparison of the JW Marriott Seoul vs a random love hotel in Cheonan:

* $400 (rack) vs. $50 (rack)

* Internet access $25/day vs In-room Internet PC for free

* Two chocolates vs. two condoms on your pillow

* Ordinary bathtub vs. heart-shaped jacuzzi in bathroom

* Whisky and cognac vs. beer, soju and dildos in minibar

* Porn costs $18/channel/day vs. three channels of it for free

~~~
ghostbrainalpha
Why would anyone want a cold dildo?

~~~
jpatokal
This particular love hotel had both a minibar and a (uncooled) toybar. Very
mildly NSFW picture:
[http://www.patokallio.name/photo/travel/Korea/Suanbo/Motel_T...](http://www.patokallio.name/photo/travel/Korea/Suanbo/Motel_Toys.JPG)

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ufo
In Brazil these things are known as "motels". I still have to think twice when
I see a reference to the word in its original context, like "Bates Motel" in
Psycho.

~~~
fouc
Is that because people park their motor-vehicles there?

~~~
gtirloni
I don't know how they started. They may have started as regular "motels" like
in the US and then turned into love hotels because they were usually far away
from downtown, near highways and that's a better place if you don't want to be
seen with someone else? Nowadays "motel" equals "lovel hotel" in Brazil,
without exception AFAIK.

Cheap motels (in the US sense) that are near highways and are not "love
hotels" will just call themselves "hotels" and avoid the sex-related stuff.
There are plenty of those.

I think it's also pretty common place for people who meet at night clubs and
don't want to take their partners back home (in order to keep their privacy).
They go to the motel and that's it.

Wikipedia doesn't have a lot on this:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motel#South_America](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motel#South_America)

~~~
Phrodo_00
Yeah, it's the same in Chile. Cheap hotels go by names that generally
translate to "inn".

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SlowRobotAhead
>I have to say: if Japan wasn’t already the most neurotically clean country
I’ve ever been to

I wonder if he's been to Singapore though? I felt like Japan was very clean,
but Singapora was on a whole different level. And not just the "they banned
gum" comments, but that I saw at 11:00pm people disappear and the cleaning
crews come out pressure washing sidewalks and anywhere people might have been.
Tokyo especially felt a LOT like NYC to me, except with much wider alleys, and
cleaner. Singapore in contrast didn't feel 'real' at all, like if Disney made
a whole country.

Had a long layover in Japan, tried to stay in a Love Hotel as all we needed
was 6 hours, but it wasn't $82, more like $120 and turned out we found a
cheaper rate at a 'normal' hotel. Next time though!

~~~
nihonde
Japan is clean from end to end, though. I’ve driven all day across the
countryside many times and never seen much more than neatly-stacked supply
storage in terms of clutter. Outside of Tokyo and Osaka, the other big cities
like Nagoya are clean as a whistle, with every street swept clear every
morning and all trash carefully monitored by a cadre of obaasan volunteers.
This is the situation in every corner of Japan that I’ve ever seen. It’s truly
“bottom-up” clean, which is remarkable and special.

~~~
jpatokal
So is Singapore. Then again, Singapore is only about 40 km end to end!

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dav
I little bit of footnote history: back in 2003, in conjunction with the 1st
International Moblogging Conference in Tokyo, a group of people (who being
armed with pretty much the planets first camphones connected to the internet
were also arguably the pioneers of instagram culture) held the 1st
International Love Hotel Moblogging Conference.

[http://www.tokyotidbits.com/lovehotel/](http://www.tokyotidbits.com/lovehotel/)

aka we were overexposing on the internet before it was cool ;)

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dustindiamond
I was wondering about the Slack emoji :love_hotel:, and now I know.

~~~
ihuman
Its not just part of Slack or Discord's emoji set; its a standard Unicode
emoji

[https://emojipedia.org/love-hotel/](https://emojipedia.org/love-hotel/)

~~~
yorwba
And before that, it was in SoftBank's nonstandard extension to the Shift JIS
encoding standard at code FBA1
[https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftBank%E7%B5%B5%E6%96%87%E5%...](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftBank%E7%B5%B5%E6%96%87%E5%AD%97)

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devy
Love Hotels are a hit in East Asian. So yes, it's popular China as well since
at least 2016[1].

[1]: [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/13/chinas-love-
ho...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/13/chinas-love-hotel-boom-
shows-nations-changing-attitudes-to-sex)

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artur_makly
'Telos' called here in Argentina.

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rwmj
Webpage text doesn't render at all unless you enable some Javascript which is
used to load fonts _with no fall-back_ , and the fonts once loaded are also
ugly and unreadable.

