Ever since we’d heard about Japanese Love hotels we planned to try one out for the night, or hour. It turned out to be a bit of a saga, as we spent half a day in the Love Hotel areas of Tokyo looking for something tacky and nasty enough to meet our requirements. It seems that ordinary Japanese people who just want to get away and have some quiet time with their partners were more interested in a hot tub and a Plasma TV than the Hello Kitty themed S&M dungeon that we had in mind. More fool them.
So disappointed we read about a place called Gang Gang Snowmans which was in Osaka, near Kyoto where we were going to head anyway so we diverted there to check it out. Apparently it had an old Cadillac on the roof you could hire for the hour, subway car, underwater themed rooms, a dungeon all kinds of awesome weird tacky fetish theming that would have made such a great post/story. So we went to Osaka and walked and walked, and checked the map, and walked, and checked the map, and went back where we had already walked, and asked people, and walked, and went back and asked the same people, who told us to walk, and walk and walk and then I mean hours later, we were so exhausted and we hadn’t found anything cringe worthy just ordinary fancy hotel rooms, maybe with an adult toys vending machine in the room, but not much more risque than that. It turned out that we couldn’t find Gang Gang Snowman because it had closed down a few years before. So instead we checked in to Hotel Love (kudos on the name guys, international, yet also classy with a suggestive underlayer of perversion! two thumbs up). I made a tour of our room that you can watch now if you like, don’t worry its safe for work:
I can’t imagine a game being developed that could so perfectly match the personality and skillset of an individual, its like they reached into her brain and plucked the idea for her perfect game, the game she was born to play.
I like being tall, upon reflection I’d say it has more advantages than disadvantages. When you’re in the supermarket and you want to reach up to pick up that last can of Heinz Baked beans from the top shelf, you have to stretch and stretch, while I don’t even have to go on tiptoes. Maybe you even have to call a shop attendant over to help, you’ll make a joke about your vertical inferiority, this is the English way, safer to mock yourself first just to let the person know you’re well aware of your inadequacies, so if they try and mock you later they’ll know, it’s nothing you don’t already know. I could list other examples of why its good to be tall, but I think I’ve made my point.
At least this was my view of being tall before I came to Japan, where the advantage/disadvantage scale has been tilted sharply in favour of the latter. While I’m not particularly tall, maybe 6ft 2”, nothing really unusual by Western standards, in Japan I’m just an inch or two below put-in-a-cage-and-poke-with-stick. Not just Japanese people, but also airplane designers, who I imagine to be 3ft high dwarves who can’t sleep unless they hear the sound of crying babies, like Adam Sandler movies and peanut bags they can’t open. Why we couldn’t have had airplanes designed by an individual more representative of the common person, I don’t know. Perhaps dwarves have mad physics skills. So after 11.5hrs on a plane I was already a little uncomfortable, still once I’d unfolded myself we began our train journey to the center, then our subway over to Akihabara where we could spend our first night in a Japanese Capsule Hotel.
Finding an address in Japan is like playing a board game entirely in a foreign language for which you don’t know the rules. At first quite fun, then you’re make the mistake of thinking your getting somewhere, as you can feel the finish line approaching you roll two sixes get sent to jail and end up hungry and tired in a fetish porn shop trying to get help from a man who can’t speak English, read English, has no clue where he is (Japanese people seem as confused as we are navigating these mazes of Tokyo’s suburbs, I’ll probably do another post on that one at some point) and would only be able to help you if instead of a good nights sleep you wanted a video of Japanese school girls peeing on each other…
Eventually with the combination of two different maps, a westerner with a Japanese girlfriend and about four other people we randomly stopped to get directions from, we found the capsule hotel. Looking back it seemed like an age, but compared to some of the hunts in which we would get epically lost, this one was actually pretty smooth.
I remember seeing capsule hotels on TV when I was younger, maybe 10 or 15 years a go. It’s quite possible that it was this moment that first began my love affair with Japan, the downright weirdness that seems to be the norm spoke to me. Essentially its just charging people $40 to sleep in a windowless tubular washing machine. It seemed destined for a place in my life’s – ‘so bad, it must be good’ filing cabinet.
Once we’d checked in, stored away our shoes, got changed into the hospital gown thingy we were supposed to wear and climbed into our little high-tech coffins (men and women are separated onto different floors and don’t share common areas) I was excited to get a good nights sleep.
When you enter the room you can see can see two rows of 20 or so capsuIes on each side. Climbing in and lying down for the first time made me wonder if this was what it was like in the womb. Sounds are strangely muffled, there’s no space and you have a strange urge to kick. I expected nutrients to be fed to be to me through a tube but instead found only a tiny tv showing very strange gameshows a radio and an alarm clock. I recommend staying some nights in a capsule hotel if you’re about to start a prison sentence, the cell is going to seem incredibly spacious after you’ve squished yourself like a concertina into your capsule pod. To say there wasn’t enough room to swing a cat would be as gross an overstatement as saying I am not the Japanese Emperor Kei-tai!
Still it was quiet, there were very few people on my floor and so I settled down to get a good nights sleep. This was when being tall came back to bite me firmly in the behind, when I realized I couldn’t lie flat because I was too long for the capsule. I could open the door and let my feet dangle out, but really, who could resist tickling a pair of feet when they came in at 2am, after a hard night on the sake? If I wouldn’t have been able to, it seemed unlikely other people wouldn’t, so that option was out. Plus with the blind up they would be able to see where the snoring was coming from, and may silence me using projectiles. Amputation was considered next, but that was possibly an over-reaction and would have prematurely ended a still very promising footballing career. I could just sleep on my side, but as Annett will testify, I have a very strict sleeping position, from, which there is no deviation. That position is flat on my back with my arms crossed like an x on my chest. Like an Egyptian king awaiting mummification, or so I like to think. Once I’m in this position my body knows to shutdown and beginning the snoring sleeping process. So unwilling to compromise I rested my head fush to the back wall and could just about assume my position with each leg diagonal and then just my toes wrapped round the edge of the bamboo door/blind. Umm comfortable.
While it wasn’t the greatest nights sleep, I woke up a few times because of a little cramp, which resulted in me rolling over to try and find a new position, elbowing the wall, which was nowhere near as the satisfying as the elbow to flesh sound it makes when I roll over and elbow Annett – although the end result was the same as the capsule was also unwilling to make me breakfast.
While it was a nice experience to pretend to be a drunk Japanese business whose missed his train, I was pleased to check out of the capsule hotel as after 11hrs on a plane and 10hrs in a biscuit tin I was hoping to find somewhere I could streeeetch out and catch some proper zzzzzz’s.
I’m thinking about experimenting with video posts, although I think I prefer the written word, here is a short one I made of the capsule hotel:
