Over in love-hotel-mad Osaka, there's a weirdly named love hotel that we haven't exposed yet: the Hotel Public Jam in southern downtown Osaka, near the Uehonmachi station. Hotel Public Jam (or Hotel PJ for those in the know) has a pretty extensive website with a menu all in English: but with all of the content only in Japanese. What we can tell you is there seems to be a high proportion of pink used in the Hotel PJ rooms.
To give you a bit more info, the Quirky Japan site had this to say in summary of the Public Jam:
This cute, modern hotel is fairly unexceptional except for the merry-go-round in room 402.
Actually we think having a merry-go-round inside even one room makes a hotel quite exceptional, and a little scarily kinky.
We've tried looking outside Osaka for some hotel lovin', but apart from Tokyo's very colorful Hotel J Girl they just don't stack up in terms of weird features, kinky rooms and razzle dazzle. So it's back to Osaka where we're thinking of trying out the Hotel Pamplona, because staying in a love hotel sounds like something that really should be likened to the running of the bulls, agreed?
Situated in downtown Dotonbori (the heart of Osaka, and the name of the river as well as the main street), Hotel Pamplona meets our requirements by having a colorfully interesting front door and some really weird stuff going on inside.
[Ed. Note: Jaunted contributor AJ McGuire recently finished a tour of Osaka and reported back to us on the town's changing love hotel scene.]
Sure, sure, different strokes for different folks and all that but this? While restraint and good taste have never been guiding lights for the love hotel industry, coaxing couples to put in some labor at Santa's cotton candy colored workshop, AKA Hotel Chapel Christmas, seems to be crossing some sort of line.
[Ed. Note: Jaunted contributor AJ McGuire recently finished a tour of Osaka and reported back to us on the town's changing love hotel scene. But today, we have a treat. A normal, non-love hotel. Enjoy.]
Yeah, I know. Its not like the NY Times Food and Wine section is reviewing local Burger Kings but think of the context. This is Osaka and thus we've passed through the looking glass and lodging in a Comfort Hotel is now exotic.
Is your B.S. detector going off yet? No? Good, stay with me. The true beauty of the Comfort Hotel Shinsaibashi is that it's exactly what it says on the label: a budget-priced, American-style hotel right in the middle of South Osaka's main nerve for drinking, eating, clubbing, shopping and all the other ways to lose your sense and your travel budget.
Jaunted has been putting together a series on UFO travel, so we figured we would add to the fray.
Almost every alien abduction story we hear is complete with some sort of odd, kinky body exams in confined spaces. Thus, alien addicts should feel right at home inside Hotel Loire's UFO room. Space fetishists can play with fake knobs, lie on slab like beds, watch Star Wars and check out the breast padding on the ships platform.
Alien loving not your bag? Room 306, is a naughty playground made up of three areas: a doctor's office complete with an examining chair and floor-to-ceiling mirrors, a replica subway car, and the main room where a blacklight aquarium scene appears on the walls when you turn out the lights.
The rooms at Loire a widely recognized as the most creative love hotel rooms in Japan.
Hotel Loire is on the outskirts of Osaka, but if you take the Tanimachi subway line to Kire-Uriwari station and walking 15 minutes.
[Ed. Note: Jaunted contributor AJ McGuire recently finished a tour of Osaka and reported back to us on the town's changing love hotel scene.]
Beyond the big, the gaudy, the crazy, the likely settings for romance not just unconventional but possibly illegal, there are the standard love hotels.
The ones that get the job done with a minimum of fiberglass mythical beasts bolted to the outside of the building. With outside decor that would not be altogether out of place for a regular tacky tourist hotel, the Hotel Cordon Bleu aims squarely at the middle of the the love hotel market, providing a setting for the average couple to make average love to be made in mildly exciting comfort.
Admittedly, we settled on the Cordon Bleu after checking out the other, more adventurous hotels in the Namba neighborhood and finding them all booked up save for the ultra premium rooms (the bed on hydraulics, a Burt Reynolds-shaped pinata, etc).
For those without a need for complex harnesses, but looking for a bathroom big enough to breakdance in, for those turned off by the cutesy/creepy vibe of the Hotel Beaver across the street but seeking something naughtier than a Ramada Inn, there's the Hotel Cordon Bleu.
[Ed. Note: Jaunted contributor AJ McGuire recently finished a tour of Osaka and reported back to us on the town's changing love hotel scene.]
As Osaka is considered the loudest, brashest, gaudiest city in Japan, its only natural that the city's love hotels compete with the neon overload of the Dotonbori district and the deranged fantasy world of nearby Universal Studios Japan. For a business whose bread and butter is discretion, love hotels are hard to miss around here. Spread liberally throughout the city, love hotels are convenient landmarks, beacons of light on drunken stumbles home, and fodder for untold numbers of WTF tourist photos.
Venerable as they are, Osaka's love hotels are not immune to change. Even much loved institutions as the Gang Snowman have been redesigned in takeovers and questionable marketing moves. In the photo above, the former Belles des Belles seems to be ripping off Robert Indiana in rebranding itself a little more generically --that is, if a massive white building sporting Greek columns, angel sculptures, a massive neon lit silver orb on the roof and the new name Hotel Love can be called generic.
The ever-reliable (but severely lacking in English) LoveHo site has a new list of Japanese love hotels in the Ostuka region of Tokyo, and judging by names alone, we want to book into the Hotel Sunshine Hill. While it may not have the gaudy colors of some of Osaka's love hotels, we think it just sounds cheerful to hang around in Sunshine Hill, no matter what your intentions.
And apparently the intentions of Japanese love hotel guests are not always impure. Recent research suggests that increasing numbers of love hotel visitors have no intention of having sex while they're there; love hotels are simply more affordable than many hotels and have the additional flexibility of rooms that can be rented by the hour if you're just needing a short nap after missing the last train home. Perhaps that's what's going on in Sunshine Hill for 3,750 Yen ($33) an hour instead of something more exotic.
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by amandak
