Today I went to a love hotel for the first time.
People have already written lots of stuff about the whys and hows of "wacky Japanese love hotels" so I won't repeat it here. The deal with love hotels is this: the super-outrageous hotels (the ones with 'theme rooms' such as Glow-in-the-dark Outer Space Room, Underwater Sea Room (with huge waterslide), Dungeon Room With Black Leather Medical Exam Table, Samurai Room, Ancient Greek Room with Bed Made Out Of Giant Faux-Marble Clamshell etc.) don't really exist anymore.
For three reasons:
1- bubble economy over
2- the "new public morals act". . . .which means I can still buy
a $18 used tampon any time I want, but I can't hang out in the Mega Underwater
Vibrating Moustache Bed Made From Mirrors. The hotels could stay in business
after The Act but had to get rid of the sexy stuff. Basically the act says
that sexy hotels = cathouses, so they are prohibited. Unless they actually
ARE cathouses, in which case they are under the protection of the mob and
are ok.
3- women don't think these wild hotels are respectable. For these newly
de-sexed hotels to survive in a bad economy, they have to encourage more
women to say, 'let's go to a hotel.' Since it's been scientifically proven
that women have no sense of humor, the hotels have become a lot more normal
looking and boring.
But my friends swore that there were still the old-school super-vegas hotels in the un-trendy, cheap-real-estate suburbs. These old-school hotels are called YUUENCHI NA HOTERU. (amusement park hotels).
So we took off to Saitama . . . About an hour's ride. It's been said that Saitama is the "new Jersey of japan" and now I see why. There is nothing here except suburbs, smog, and delivery trucks. The taxi guy was an utter boob. He wouldn't take us anywhere cool. eventually he just dumped us in the middle of nowhere next to two hotels that weren't any more exciting than Best Western. One of the 'best western' employees was cool enough to call us a second cab. We made damn sure to tell the second cabbie, 'dude, this isn't what it looks like! she's NOT A JAPANESE WOMAN! We're both foriengers!' he drove for like 15 minutes and took us to this other hotel, and even the lobby was amazing. Your first view is of a. . . .ROBOT RECEPTIONIST. You click on the picture of the room you want. It even has a prerecorded woman's voice describing the room.
Then you go to the room. . .there's no key. The deal is: you PAY TO GET OUT. the door lock actually has a plexiglass shield around it on the inside, so you can't pick the lock and leave. Next to the double-locked door there's a vending machine where you can pay if you don't want to deal with a human receptionist. So, great. Even though they got rid of the fun Disneyland aspect, they found a way to keep the shame. Also humorous: posted on the un-open-able door is an emergency exit map, showing how to leave if there's a fire. These guys, always kidding around.
Once inside , I discovered what has replaced the waterslides, King Tut pyramids, inflatable moustaches, vibrating wineglass-shaped bidets, etc: karaoke. Not just karaoke, but video games, and a gigantic flat panel tv. Judging by the amount of ads for flat panel tv, most Japanese enjoy this more than sex anyway. To use all of these devices, there is a control panel that looks like something out of Star Trek: big buttons with primary colors, and 1,000 of them.
Also you have to have a degree in electrical engineering to even begin figuring out how to use this damn thing. I'm sure many people checked in for a quick fuck but wound up paying for a whole night, just because they were trying to learn the control panel!
So we didn't do much of that. Not after we discovered the BATHROOM. Holy Moses.
The bathroom is bigger than my APARTMENT. There is a radio in there AND A TV. A sauna, a whirlpool, and 6 different kinds of little teabags you can put in the water. The only downside to the bathroom was that all the gadgets- sauna, shower, sink, bath - were all in SEPARATE LITTLE ROOMS with semi-reflective plexiglass walls, which gave the room an ambience midway between carnival funhouse and maximum security prison. Plus, I'm pretty used to sucking my little potbelly in when she's looking at me, but being in the bathroom gives her perpetual 360 degree vision-there's no way to hide the belly unless I jump in the tub. Which I did. Jesus!
The tub is the size of Oscar Welles' coffin. AND it's a whirlpool. The whirlpool has colored lights AND the showerhead has like 4 different controls for pressure and distribution of the water spray. And I'm not even going to start talking about the BUBBLE BATH.
Basically I was like, "ok, you can go home now."
Once I got to bed it was lame because the Locked Door Thing means you can't go out and get food. And I was too hungry to sleep; I hadn't brought a picnic with me. So I couldn't sleep. Whatever, I just went back to the bathtub.
She got me back though: basically she likes makeup as much as I like baths , which is an amount roughly 3 times as much as we like each other. So if I was mostly turned on by the 4 way shower nozzle, she was turned on by the HUGE bathroom mirror, makeup lights, and giant counter-finally enough room to lay out all of her cosmetics and start going all nuts with foundation. They've even thoughtfully provided a little stool so your legs don't get tired doing makeup for 4 fucking hours.
So she was just doing that the whole morning up until we left. Whatever, I went back for a third bath. It's great how these expensive luxury items are making us go farther apart instead of closer together. But whatever.
At checkout, the clerk spent a long time writing directions for how to walk to the station. In spite of taking ten minutes, she didn't bother to take 3 seconds to tell us how long the walk would be: 30 MINUTES. In the freezing January cold. Saitama sucks. That's not even the punchline though. This is the punchline: once we got home, my pal discovered she'd left some jewelry back at the hotel, which they claimed they never found.
so: lost earrings, freezing walk, mean taxi drivers, no food, and a bathtub i seem to like more than her: i've got a lot to apologize for.
luckily they still have rooms available at The Argument Hotel.
.
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