ABSTRACT
In documenting the many sites, practices and features associated with Japanese love hotels, certain patterns and interpretations have emerged, which together muster a provisional cultural history.1 My overall sense is that the love hotel exists as a loose but distinctive semiological landscape, which is simultaneously visceral and virtual, real and representational, operating at a variety of different scales and contexts, from the city as a whole down to the minutiae of the love hotel interior. The love hotel now exerts a presence within Japanese culture in the street, at the newsstand, in the art gallery, at trade fairs, in the money markets, at home and at work, from the train and from the car, on television and on the internet. It draws together not just different clientele, but different publics,2 functioning as a communicative site or sphere of interaction. More specifically, love hotels constitute what Ikegami calls ‘counter-publics,’ which ‘consisted of light-hearted, cheerful representations of the sensual pleasures of urban sophisticates,’3 commonly identified in the Tokugawa period as akusho, bad places. This is not to say they were ‘counter-sites’ in the sense that Foucault inferred in his writings on the heterotopia:4 rather than a space that is segregated from the everyday, the akusho has been shown to interact directly with its surrounding context. Indeed, Tamotsu Hirosue has argued that ‘akusho constituted a non-everyday site . . . yet it impinged on the everyday in subtle ways . . . it was a non-everyday place that existed in an everyday way . . . these places were real places.’5
