Japan's infamous love hotels are a cultural art form. This is not a guidebook to the erotic world of Japan. Neither is it a collection of pornographic photos of hot Asian chicks and where to find them. This is a book of fine art photographs of the interiors of hotel rooms. There is not a photograph of a live person in the entire volume. The rooms in these hotels appear that they were designed by the animation artists of Disney. I kept expecting to find a "Pirates of the Caribbean" room. I had to settle for a room entitled "Pirate Room." It was pictured near an aquarium motif with the name "Underwater Room."
Each of the rooms shown in the book appears like an individual cell out of animated film. These rooms definitely represent individual rides in a pleasure park for adults. In most of the beautifully reproduced color photographs the viewer has to look carefully in order to tell if the room really exists or is just a skillfully done cartoon painting of a room. While every detail of each room seems almost like an unused exhibit in a museum, the one tip-off that the scene is real is that the beds shown in each location look like they had just been sloppily made. The spreads are usually slightly rumpled as if the maid was in a terrific hurry to get done before the photographer arrived. Another feature of the beds is that almost every bed has some form of chains with leather cuffs or other type of restraint in each corner of the bed and on top of the bed spreads. Many of the rooms also have S&M restraints hanging from the ceilings or attached to the walls or on crosses against the walls. A simple list of some of the picture titles for the Osaka hotel rooms says much about the content of the pictures. "Igloo Waiting Area", "Naughty Nurse Play Area," "Hello Kitty S&M Room," "Prison Cell," "Alien Abduction Play Area," "Subway Room," " Disco Ball," "Spider Room," and "Bondage Bathroom." There are many more amazing rooms with amazing names. There seems no lack of kinkiness and kitsch in these first-class establishments.
The photographer has a real gift for capturing the sensuality of these love hotel room designs. If sex is mostly above the neck, then the creators of these fantasy adventures are true erotic geniuses. The photographs are straightforward and amazing. It's difficult to show people living and loving without showing any people. The photographer has a real talent for recognizing the skill of the interior designers of these fantasies.
If the reader wishes to see real people working in the near-cousins of these Japanese cartoon fantasy worlds, Joan Sinclair has done a wonderful job with an entirely different approach in her book "Pink Box: Inside Japan's Sex Clubs." Since non-Japanese aren't usually allowed in these clubs, Sinclair's book is even more amazing and will be eye opening to any western audience. The American equivalent to the book "Love Hotels" is Timothy Hursley's "Brothels of Nevada." His architectural studies of the legal Brothel Industry occasionally show a real person within their gaudy architectural fantasy world created mostly through a system of combining over-sized trailers into sexual playgrounds.
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