“These venues have a very ‘talkative’ quality visually – they‘re expressive in design, reflecting aspects of local culture, values, and even fantasies”
– François Prost, Love Hotels
There are about 37,000 Love Hotels in Japan. Sex on the clock in a rented room is big business in Japan, catering for 500 million lovers paying $40 billion a year.
French photographer François Prost’s fascinating photo series of Japan’s Love Hotels shows us that they don’t always go for bland and nameless. Some do advertise with a simple heart in the window or a room rate for a “rest” (休憩, kyūkei) as well as for an overnight stay. (That “rest” period varies from a perhaps generous one to three hours.)
But many other Love Hotels scream it out loud. Before you reach mirrored ceilings, revolving beds draped in velvet and themed rooms, you can cross a drawbridge to a replica castle, step aboard the love boat and get beamed up to a UFO.
“In many ways, my approach to photographing love hotels mirrors my other projects, which I consider a form of landscape photography. I choose specific types of venues in each country—those with distinct, often kitschy, or roadside architecture—and photograph them across the region with a consistent framing style. This allows me to create a portrait of a country through the lens of its vernacular architecture. I’m drawn to the aesthetic of these places and how their facades reveal something about the people who inhabit or frequent them.”
– François Prost
Japan is the country of heated toilet seats with water jets (front and back) and hot air to dry you off. Knowing that the techno-lav is normal in the Land of the Rising Sun, where up til 2023 the age of consent was 13 (when it was raised to 16), you wonder what obsession and kinks the Love Hotels’ “theme rooms” serve?
You can discover some of the possibilities in this Japanese sex guide, ukiyo-e artist Kitagawa Utamaro’s 12 illustrations of sexually explicit shunga pictures published in 1788, the erotic art of Namio Harukawa (very NSFW), erotic prints by Kesai Eisen (he inspired Van Gogh) and Kawanabe Kyôsai’s satirical penis contests.
What why Love Hotels? In an article on Japan’s sex culture, Philip Patrick looks at “Japan’s traditional ‘black box’ attitude to sexual crime. In a culture where direct expressions of opinion or intent are considered impolite and injurious to societal harmony, and everything is caveated or left unsaid, it is often considered too difficult to determine what happens in the ‘black box’ of an intimate encounter between two individuals.”
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