What’s it like to own a love hotel in Japan?
It perhaps sounds on paper like a sleazy job, right? Or maybe one where you get to spy on all kinds of sexual antics.
The reality is, of course, most mundane (and discretion is the name of the game). In fact, running a love hotel is a tough, busy job because the emphasis is so much on amenities, convenience, and comfort — and with a fast turnaround. Love hotels today offer a lot of extras, from video games and karaoke to meals.
This is revealed in another video by Abroad in Japan that we recently rediscovered. It’s from summer 2019 — remember those pre-COVID days? — and has nearly four million views, so you may well have seen it already.
In the video, take a tour with the larger-than-life owner of The Hotelion in Sendai in the northeast of Japan, exploring some of the fun and attractive rooms. (Abroad in Japan previously took another tour of the same hotel a few years ago.) They each have different themes like a maze and sandbags, and a somewhat more mysterious room called the “lotus” (apparently for, er, relaxing and dying after having sex).
The video is mostly a showcase of the hotel, but you get some glimpses of what happens behind the scenes for the staff cooking the food and monitoring operations. That said, the final minutes include a good interview with the owner, where he discusses how they maintain hygiene and the stigma attached to his job.
It should be noted that most love hotels in Tokyo are smaller and simpler, and stays are more expensive than the hotel profiled here.
