UFOs, boats and castles: Surreal photos of Japan’s most peculiar ‘love hotels’

(CNN) — Last year, French photographer François Prost spent hours browsing Google Maps to plan a road trip documenting Japan’s “love hotels” — establishments found across the country that offer hourly rates and, most importantly for guests, privacy. But as he embarked on his 3,000-kilometer (1,864-mile) journey, they proved impossible to miss.

While some featured heart or lip-themed signage (or names like Hotel Passion, Hotel Joy or Hotel BabyKiss, to use a few examples from his trip), the hotels were most easily identified by playful architecture that is, counterintuitively, far from discreet.

“You can see spaceships, boats and also a big whale, which is very childish somehow,” said Prost in a Zoom interview from France. “And many, many of them are castles,” he added of the facades of around 200 love hotels captured in his new photography series.

While guests can rent rooms by the night, Japan’s love hotels also offer short-stay rates for “kyukei” or “rest.” They boomed after the country outlawed prostitution in 1958, a move that shuttered brothels and pushed the industry into alternative premises. Yet today, rather than being associated with sex work or infidelity, they primarily cater to couples living in small or shared family homes.

“There is, of course, a little bit of prostitution, but it’s mainly people — especially young people and young couples — going there to have privacy,” said Prost. His looped route wound down through Honshu and Shikoku (the largest and smallest of Japan’s four main islands, respectively) before returning to the capital, Tokyo.

“And nowadays, they’re not only for sex. They have also turned more to leisure (facilities), such as karaoke nightclubs.”

Unique architectural tradition

Lodgings with hidden entrances date back centuries in Japan, though a more immediate precursor to modern love hotels is the post-war “tsurekomi yado” (or “bring-your-own inn”), which were often run by families with rooms to spare.

The kind of distinctive architecture Prost documented, however, emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, as the establishments became more upmarket. Passersby needed to know the buildings’ function at first glance, and owners wanted to differentiate their businesses from regular hotels.

One of the most famous 1970s love hotels, the Meguro Emperor, was designed to resemble a European castle. It sparked a wave of castle-themed hotels, dozens of which feature in Prost’s new series. Elsewhere, he encountered buildings modeled on French country houses, tropical beach clubs and — in the case of Hotel Aladdin in Okayama — a grand Arabian palace with onion domes.

Despite their somewhat garish appearance, the hotels’ design reflects their function. For the sake of privacy, exteriors often feature few, or even fake, windows. Many of the hotels use self-service check-ins and other design features reducing the chance of unwelcome encounters.

“Everything is planned to make sure you’re not going to cross someone when you enter the building,” Prost said. “So, the entrance is different from the exit, and there (can be) one lift going up (to the rooms) and another for going back down. All of this is part of the design process.”

The kind of peculiar architecture Prost encountered became less common in the 1990s. For one, the hotels began marketing themselves towards women, who were increasingly the partner making decisions. But legislation passed in the mid-1980s also placed love hotels under police jurisdiction, meaning that newer establishments often looked to subtler designs to avoid being classified as such. (Having a lobby or restaurant and removing rotating beds or large mirrors were other ways to skirt the legal classification.)

As a result, it is difficult to say precisely how many love hotels still operate in Japan, though there are thought to be upwards of 20,000. Usage data is similarly lacking, though oft-cited hospitality industry figures from the late 1990s suggested that couples were making around 500 million trips to the establishments each year. If true, this would mean that around half of all sex in Japan was occurring in love hotels in those years, legal scholar Mark D. West wrote in his 2005 book “Law in Everyday Japan.”

Lens on Japan

Love hotels are also relatively common in Asian countries including South Korea and Thailand, while short-stay hotels or motels in other parts of the world often perform a similar social function. But the term remains most associated with Japan, despite some industry attempts to rebrand them as “leisure” or “fashion” hotels to avoid the original name’s negative connotations.

Prost believes the establishments (and his photos) highlight a contrast between Japan’s social conservatism and people’s attitudes towards sex. He described the unusual designs as a kind of modern vernacular — everyday architecture that “says more about the country” than famous landmark buildings.

With the help of a newly launched Kickstarter campaign, he hopes to publish the images in a book next year. It’s an approach that proved successful in the past: Prost’s most recent book “Gentlemen’s Club,” which saw him traveling more than 6,000 miles around the United States photographing the country’s colorful strip club architecture, was published using crowdfunding in 2021.

He’s also documented nightclub facades in France, Spain and the Ivory Coast. Beyond the exploration of vice and society after-hours, these projects share a common thread: they are not just about the establishments but the country and culture within which they operate.

“I would say these projects are more like landscape photography,” he said. “They show the country through the prism of these venues.”

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