ABSTRACT
In this chapter I will address the way in which the interior design of the love hotel bedroom has evolved, and show what this reveals about changing circumstances of Japanese lifestyles in the postwar period. The various attributes of the interior will each be discussed in terms of their specific contribution to the spatial, visual and material cultural identity of the love hotel and its occupation, and in the process I will establish points of reference to key contemporaneous sociological and cultural orientations. The love hotel interior is a quasi-domestic space that nevertheless stands in opposition to domesticity and, by placing it in the context of the limitations of Japan’s postwar housing provision, the parameters of both the unadulterated dream and lived reality with respect to home will be made apparent. Considering important shifts in the love hotel interior’s actual and conceptual configuration, I will show how at different stages of its development, the dominant image of the love hotel interior and its associated technologies takes inspiration from such twentieth-century icons as the bachelor pad, the boudoir, and also from earlier Western mise-en-scènes associated with fairytale castles and bridal chambers. Throughout its development, both imagistically and technologically, the love hotel interior has continuously represented a site of resistance. I will show how the nature of this resistance has changed and weakened, and how its relationship to the outside world has become apparently contiguous yet increasingly complex.
