Yuki Matsuri: The Love Hotels

We were in Sapporo the day before the snow festival was due to open, and were debating where to go. The main criteria were warmth and the ability to drink carry-out alcohol, since the bars were mostly still closed, what with it being the early afternoon and all.

I argued that since none of us had ever been to a love hotel before, a room would make for a much more interesting atmosphere than the usual 'karaoke box with jacket over the window' approach. We eventually found the love hotel district, after a few calls of 'bugger this for a lark, it's too cold' and several inquiries of locals that met with terse 'I wouldn't know about that' replies.

The next mission was to find one that would let seven people, six of whom were large, white and noisy, into a single room for purposes best left unspecified. The lobbies and entranceways we entered varied from the fabulously strange to the dull, and the interfaces from touch-panel displays to cracked and peeling buttons to a polite suited male receptionist in one up-market instance. We were variously told that only two, three or four (with supplementary payment) people could enter a single room, in almost every case by a nearby phone ringing while we milled around and tried to select rooms by the automatic interface. The few hotels with face-to-face contact we didn't even bother asking.

The eighth(?) attempt, whereby two people scouted out and chose a room, followed by two successive groups, worked in every respect but one. When we had four people in the room and three still coming the door was shut and we were slightly horrified to find it couldn't be opened from inside or out! If Chihiro hadn't been on hand to pick up the phone and apologetically explain that she had entered the room while her boyfriend was still outside we would have been rumbled for sure. There was an emergency 'break glass to exit' panel, but the time-locked doors certainly took us, and I guess any past rape/claustrophobia victims, by suprise.

Sad to say that we didn't secure one of the weird and wonderful rooms with rotating beds, mirrored ceilings, aquarium walls, red lighting or other delights, but we did have a five-foot porn display, and a few hours to play truth or dare and get hammered.

Note the crazy regulation pixellation that afflicts all legal Japanese porn, and Felicia's rapt viewing of same.