Heartbreak Hotel

I found an awesome book of pictures this weekend.
Love Hotels. It presents pictures of Japanese love hotels without text other than the identification of the hotel and the name of the room. Pictured above is a portion of the Hello Kitty S&M room, an incredibly popular choice for those that frequent such places.

While the photos are presented without editorializing, there is an intro that gives information on the phenomenon of the love hotel in Japan. The love hotel is part of a history that begins in the geisha tea house. The Japanese author that has created this introduction points to a dichotomy between the Japanese idea of family/honor and sex/love. Amazing sex and love are not necessarily what a Japanese person expects to find in a marriage. The important thing is keeping the image of family/honor intact. This leads husbands and wives, but mostly husbands, to seek outside sexual contacts.

The love hotel, in the beginning, was somewhat like the American no-tell motel. The biggest difference seems to be that the love hotel is designed for rendezvous. In recent history, entrepreneurs have seen more potential in the love hotel, leading to highly stylized spaces for sex play: undersea adventures, classroom settings, a mock subway, and the ever notorious Hello Kitty room. It has become a hot thing for young people to party in the love hotel and more young singles frequent them.

The introduction takes a preachy turn as this Japanese author decries the focus of these hotels. S&M elements are to be found in most every room. The fantasies the rooms are built around are male fantasies, featuring schoolgirls being chained to blackboards and innocent women molested on the subway. In many cases, the people going to these rooms are young women who have just met their partners.

The author contends that the current state of the love hotel shows a break down in the male psyche that leads them to pursue women only as objects: the wife kept at home, and the woman chained to the Hello Kitty themed bed in the hotel room. There is a disparity in power in these situations to be sure, but I was a little sad that this amusement park approach to sex came with such a negative implication.

I wanted to imagine what it was like to be chained to the Hello Kitty bed without having to wonder about a society where men seem to prefer that all their women be helpless.