f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review
[Title] Japanese Love Hotels: A Cultural History [Author] Sarah Chaplin [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2007 [Read] 2015/02/15 [Review] 
(words: 110,626; ~3h) Heavily academicized discussion of contemporary Japanese love hotels, with an architectural history and history of some related locations for having sex. The prevalence of love hotels is interesting, and Chaplin backs it with a large survey she did of current love hotels. (Curiously, this survey goes almost entirely unused in the book - some photos from it, and a few statistics are mentioned like “Only one establishment in a sample of over 300 indicated room numbers and prices used Japanese numerals; the rest were all given in Arabic numerals” or how only 2 had manual rather than automatic doors, but given how huge an effort that survey must have been, it’s oddly underused.) Much of what is a pretty good book is hidden in woolly academic discussion, referring to a panoply of Western & Japanese critics and writers. For the most part, these parts are the worst, since they are either masturbatory or obscure discussions of the obvious. (Does it really require an intimate familiarity with Benjamin’s Arcades Project and its various schemas, brought up repeatedly over the book, or Arie Graafland or Hidenobu Jinnai or Barrie Shelton or André Sorensen or Donald Richie or Mitsuo Inoue in order to notice how Japanese cities have large main streets but also narrower car-free intimate back-streets with a mix of housing and small shops/businesses? Or that there are distinct neighborhoods, sometimes with physical barriers or gates demarcating them? I would think anyone with a pulse who went there, or even just consumed some jidaigeki fiction - to give a random example, the movie Fuse Teppō Musume no Torimonochō - would notice most of the neighborhood and pleasure quarters background.) It is difficult to see what discussions of how love hotels are “liminoid” rather than “liminal” really add to one’s understanding. What is good, however, is when we get down to brass tacks: what are love hotels, how do they operate on a day to day basis, how does the industry collectively respond to changing economic and social conditions, and what are the consequences of their existence? Chaplin takes a bit of an architectural focus to this, and I sometimes rolled my eyes at the attempts to divine deep meanings in various hotels’ choice of adornment or design (often, the true answer is simply that the architect liked it or was copying it from somewhere), but that focus is understandable since the bones of hotels are well documented and preserved in things like photographs while the living flesh is harder to capture. Those more-factual parts are the best parts - learning how there are 30,000 love hotels, revenue of ¥4 trillion with 1.37m couples using daily and ~2.5 couples per room per day and as high as 7 (avg ~78.8 stays per room per month) which pays for decorating costs per room as high as $150k (black-lights: $10k per, saunas $15k per) and of course bribes (easily $100k) to all the local power groups, spotting love hotel tax evasion through water utility bills, the now-familiar immigrant-based cleaning staffs (but not South/Central American, SE Asian like Filipinos), how South Korea eradicated many of the Seoul love hotels by converting them into tourist housing for the Olympics, the 1985 law quasi-banning love hotels & how they responded (as you’d predict - like squeezing air in a balloon), the automation which saves face while using a love hotel and their cutting-edge entertainment systems (as well as how they can go wrong), or how the 12-zoning system lets love hotels infiltrate regions of cities where one would not necessarily expect anything associated with the sex trade or the power dynamics of the Tokugawa shogunate fighting organized religion & redlight districts (“By the end of the Tokugawa era…temples occupied 15 per cent of urban areas”, which leads to some amusing photos of conjunctions of love hotels & temples), the grumping of old people about how before proto-love-hotels everyone had sex outside in the field and enjoyed it more and noodle shops posting signs clarifying they were real noodle restaurants, the insinuation that a number of well-known architects designed love hotels but refused to take any credit or acknowledge involvement, the occasional discursion into a related topic (the adoption of Western-style beds turns out to be unexpectedly lengthy and interesting), some of the stranger decorations (“…one popular love hotel interior, in which ‘Yamamoto Shinya [a popular porno film director] appears on the transparent wall between the bathroom and the bedroom, as if to prompt us to act out a film.’”), the rural Japanese practice of “night-courting” which reminded me of some material on early British & American pre-marriage sexual practices like “bundling”, how the Crown Prince & Disney doubled Japanese TV ownership 1958-1959, and offbeat uses of love hotels (watching the 2006 FIFA World Cup with friends on a much nicer TV, families resting during city outings & enjoying the pool). Most of this was new to me and interesting to read about, so it’s too bad that I had to slog through some deadly-dull material to get to the good parts.
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