LOL. Love hotels, huh? Okay…
Love Hotels
To the average westerner, a “Love Hotel” sounds like a sleazy place where people have illicit trysts and try not to get caught. There is that aspect, of course, but some of the love hotels are actually quite nice. Nicer, in fact, than most of the regular hotels, the rooms being bigger and better appointed. In your nice LH, for example, the bathroom will be huge, with a jacuzzi-type tub and lots of mirrors. Kinda cool. And a necessary outlet around here, where the walls in most houses are very thin. Couples who have children make extensive use of LHs.
If you decide to go to one of these places, do NOT try to get in speaking English, because they won’t let you. If you’re with a Japanese woman, let her do the talking (which she’ll be happy to do); if not, you’d best have a very good handle on the language. There is a partition so that you can’t see the clerk (and he can’t see you, more to the point), but if they hear an accent they’ll probably turn you away.
Funniest LH-related story I know: When I was teaching at Berlitz one of our students was a guy named Kishimoto, who was a LH manager. This guy looked like someone who’d manage a LH: small, skinny, pale from never having seen the sun, green teeth, the whole bit. (Think of a Japanese version of Steve Buscemi in a really sleazy role.) But he was a very nice guy.
Anyway, he most often requested a teacher named Karen, who was a very nice-looking blond New Zealander woman. One day when she couldn’t teach him she asked me if I’d check to see what his rates were, and whether it was possible to have more than two people stay in a room together overnight. She had some friends (8 people, as it turned out) coming down from Osaka in a van, and they were going to pick her up on their way down to Kyuushuu for the summer vacation. Hotels being small and expensive here, they were trying to find a way to economize.
So after my lesson with Kishimoto, I asked him. This was in English, so it took me a little while to make him understand what I wanted. When he finally go it, he drew himself up in indignation and said:
“No! No group! My hotel, one man. One woman. No child! No animal!”
The things this guy must have seen… Still makes me laugh every time I think about it.