The Love Hotel Manager

Below are a couple more pages from my new book about love hotels. Today’s excerpt is about what it’s like to be a love hotel manager.

I spent years visiting love hotels around Japan, interviewing love hotel designers, owners and staff, and wading through Japanese books on sex and love hotels to bring you this book.

It’s 182 pages of information about love hotels – their history, the people who design and operate them, their place in Japanese society, crime, and much, much more. There’s also a love hotel guide with information on how to get to the best hotels in Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Nagoya, Yokohama, Sapporo, and Fukuoka.

For more information about love hotels, please visit my newly updated love hotel page at: http://www.quirkyjapan.or.tv/lovehotels.html

To order or find out more about the book, please visit: http://www.quirkyjapan.or.tv/lovehotelbookintro.htm. There’s also a smaller guidebook, with just the hotel information for just 500 yen: http://www.quirkyjapan.or.tv/lovehotelguide.html

Paradize Park in Izu

A diorama of what happens to murderers and thieves in the Buddhist hell.

The Izu Gokurakuen (Izu Paradise Park) is a strange attraction in  a popular hot spring in the Izu peninsula, which is filled with gruesome dioramas of the Buddhist hells that would give Stephen King the willies.  There are hundreds of little mannequins and dolls having their heads torn off, their skin flayed, being boiled alive and forced to eat  their own feces.  After the hells, it’s off to the Pure Land, where we learn that the temperature is the same as in Hawaii and that there is no rent or key money in Heaven.  It’s all based on a famous Buddhist text called the Ojoyoshu, the oriental equivalent of Dante’s Divine Comedy.  The oddest thing about it all is that it’s run by a family who worked together to make all the gruesomely realistic museum and it seems to be a popular stop for tour buses full of middle-aged couples.
ADDRESS: 370-1 Shimofunahara, Amagiyugashima-cho, Tagata-gun, Shizuoka, TEL: (0558) 87 0253, Admission 900 yen, Open 10-6, closed Thursdays.

Other posts about Paradise Park:

http://qjphotos.wordpress.com/2008/11/07/paradise-park-in-izu/

http://qjphotos.wordpress.com/2008/09/15/konseishin-the-penis-god/

http://qjphotos.wordpress.com/2008/05/18/izu-gokurakuen/

http://qjphotos.wordpress.com/2008/02/23/16/