Hotel Employee Claims Indecent Act Was for Safety Check

On August 8, the Shibuya Police Department announced the arrest of Koji Honda, 49, a love hotel employee, on suspicion of indecent assault. The suspect touched a sleeping woman in a guest room of a love hotel in Shibuya where he worked.

The suspect forcibly touched the breasts and pubic area of a woman in her 20s who was sleeping in the guest room between 5:30 and 6:50 a.m. on March 25. The female victim checked into this room with a man, but the man left the room first.

The suspect, Honda, who worked part-time at this hotel and was in charge of the front desk and cleaning, was working alone at the time of the incident. It appears that he entered the room after realizing that only one man had left the room, and the incident was discovered when the woman noticed that she was being touched and called 110.

Honda said, “I knocked on the door several times to confirm his safety. I touched her shoulder, but not the lower half of her body,” he said , denying the charge. However, at least five indecent videos of him touching sleeping female customers were found on the suspect’s smartphone, and the Shibuya Police Department is investigating the connection.

The aforementioned reporter says that the background of this incident is related to the incident that shook the public in July last year.

In this case, an employee of a love hotel in downtown Susukino, Sapporo, became suspicious when a guest did not check out after hours and entered the room, where he found the decapitated body of a man. A then 29-year-old woman was arrested and charged with entering the room with the man the night before and taking his head after the murder.

Since this incident, the hotel where the suspect Honda was working had been thoroughly checking for the survival of the couple by calling the extension phone if one of the couples who stayed at the hotel left first, and knocking on the door if there was no answer. The suspect Honda must have abused this rule. It can be said that he entered the room after confirming that the woman was sound asleep, although he also made an extension phone call and knocked on the door before entering the room.

The general perception of a hotel is that it is a place where privacy and security are guaranteed. However, there have been several cases in the past where employees have broken into rooms and committed crimes.

Last August, an employee of a long-established hotel in Yokohama’s Chinatown broke into a room where a couple was staying using the hotel’s master key. When the two men noticed that he was taking spy photos of the woman’s sleeping face, they seized him and arrested him on the charge of trespassing. Several sleeping faces of women were found on the employee’s phone.

Also in March of this year, a male employee (29 at the time) was arrested in Mutsu City, Aomori Prefecture, on suspicion of breaking into a guest room for the purpose of taking voyeuristic photographs,” said a case writer.

It seems that in a hotel, even if the room is locked, it is not easy to sleep with the pillow raised high.