A Human Stream

During my first year in Japan, I lived an existence quite like an average Japanese salaryman, living in a company dormitory, eating most meals from what I could buy at a convenience store or izakaya, having a long commute to the office, and having nowhere private I could spend time with my girlfriend. (Women were not allowed in my dorm.) Like most unmarried Japanese women, (girlfriend) Kaori lived with her parents, so she had nowhere private to spend time with me, either.

We thus did what most Japanese people our age did: we went to "love hotels." Unlike their low-rent American equivalent, the no-tell motel, love hotels tended to be more cheesy than sleazy. The decor was routinely tacky, featuring as you might imagine, "fantasy" themes like Greek columns or floor-to-ceiling mirrors. However, love hotels were generally clean, discreetly located in back alleys away from prying eyes, and relatively inexpensive. They were conveniently priced for a three-hour "rest" during the daytime or an all-night "stay" from 10:00 pm to 10:00 am. Some tourist books used to advise people traveling to Japan on the cheap to stay in love hotels, although you have to be out during the daytime and can't leave your luggage there. I once stayed overnight in a love hotel in Kamakura when nothing else was available on short notice.

In the suburbs, love hotels tend to cluster near highway exits, and are noticeable from their excessive use of neon and their architecture, which runs from the Parthenon to Magic Kingdom. In cities, they tend be located near major train stations, usually on back streets away from where the main entertainments are.

The area of Tokyo known as Shibuya has a fairly extensive love hotel area, known colloquially as "hoteru gai" ("hotel town" or "hotel street"), which sits atop one of the hills that surrounds the Shibuya train station and shopping district. Hoteru Gai is a warren of back streets, many of them dead ends, most of them containing love hotels of one description or another, ranging in price from reasonable to very expensive. Because Shibuya was convenient to both of our homes (in the sense that we could both easily get to Shibuya by train), Shibuya was a regular meeting place for me and Kaori. We also had a couple of regular spots in Hoteru Gai.

Kaori being only 20 (I was 22!), she was still subject to a curfew of last train, and it was rare that we booked a "stay." But on one occasion, we stayed overnight on a weekday. The next morning, we left the hotel early to get to work -- just like everyone else in all the other hotels in Hoteru Gai. We walked out onto the street and were joined by a few other people leaving the other hotels on our alley. Our alleyway emptied into a larger street, and as each successive alleyway fed into the main street, the trickle grew into a human stream. Couples reaching the main street immediately broke away from each other and walked separately. Everyone walked briskly, making for the station, their eyes strictly in front, no one (except me) looked around for fear of making eye contact with an acquaintance, a gossipy co-worker or a friend of their real girlfriend or boyfriend. By the time we reached Dogenzaka Street, a major shopping street running down the hill to Shibuya Station, the trickle from our alleyway had become a river of people running down to the station, everyone speeding as quickly as possible away from Hoteru Gai, making for the plausible deniability of Shibuya Station.