Did Love Hotels Begin in 19th-Century Britain? Inside the World of Image Rooms
Image play—represented by cosplay at image clubs and adult entertainment venues—is also part of the cultural history of the sex industry. This is the latter half of the first installment of a series in which sex-industry journalist Akira Ikoma explores that history. The prototype of the image room, which realizes fantasies in tangible form, already existed in 19th-century Europe.
The British crown prince who enjoyed seaweed champagne
Image rooms in the sex industry also existed in modern Europe. In 1878, when the third World Exposition was held in Paris, France, a brothel called “Chabanais” opened near the Louvre Museum, aiming to attract exposition visitors.
In France, the government introduced a system of regulated prostitution in 1802, and “maisons de tolérance” (licensed houses; the French term meaning “brothel”) were not uncommon, but it is said that no one had ever seen a house of prostitution as lavish and magnificent as Chabanais.
Inspired by the exposition’s highlight, the “Palaces of Nations,” Chabanais put forward the idea of national pavilions, preparing rooms such as “Japanese style,” “Egyptian style,” “Chinese style,” “Turkish style,” and “Russian style,” all filled with Oriental taste and exotic atmosphere.
In addition, it also offered rooms unified in the styles of eras famous for their debauchery, such as the “Directory Government Era Room,” “Medieval Room,” “Napoleon III Room,” and “Louis XV Room.” Chabanais even had tours that allowed tourists to view the interior, and it is said to have been like a nighttime world exposition, making visitors feel as though they were touring countries around the world without leaving the building.
These rumors spread worldwide through word of mouth among foreigners who visited Chabanais, drawing the wealthy and the famous. It is said that writer Guy de Maupassant, painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and actor Humphrey Bogart were among its favored patrons. Paris at the time had many brothels besides Chabanais, but Japanese-style rooms furnished with patterned folding screens and hanging quilts became all the rage.
Among the patrons was Edward VII of England during his time as crown prince.
A frequent visitor, he had a private room reserved for him. It contained a custom-made bed bearing the royal coat of arms, a fine Indian-style mirror, and a horse-shaped chair known as the love chair. It was designed so that the large-bodied crown prince could be attended by two women at the same time, and it had a truly mysterious shape. In today’s terms, it would be like a deluxe version of a pink chair.
Chabanais also had a special copper bathtub. A legend remains that Edward VII, while crown prince, filled this luxurious tub—decorated with ornaments of nude female figures exposing their chests—with champagne, had several prostitutes bathe in it, and then drank that champagne with his friends. He created a champagne bath and indulged in seaweed champagne, so to speak, instead of seaweed sake. The pleasures of Western nobility and Japanese feudal lords were not so different after all.
A soapland with an exterior modeled after a Western castle (Takamatsu Castle East District, ’06)A Showa-era love hotel that looked just like an image club
Play rooms set up around specific situations were also adopted by Japanese love hotels under the name concept rooms. Concept rooms such as samurai-residence style, forest rooms, houseboat rooms, rooms with Japanese gardens, palace style, mountain lodge style, medieval European castle style, and ancient Roman Empire style were devices intended to keep customers from getting bored. For guests, they offered the thrill of briefly forgetting everyday life and feeling as if they had stepped into an extraordinary world.
Love hotels in which each room had a different interior theme, giving guests the pleasure of choosing, appeared during the period of high economic growth and were a big hit. Since every room was different, satisfied customers would think, “Next time, let’s try a different room.” Hotels that allowed guests to hold such expectations and a sense of excitement gained popularity.
Similar ingenuity can be seen in today’s sex industry as well.
At the high-end soapland “JAPAN Club” in Yokohama, there are rooms with an atmospheric, purely Japanese style, as well as nature-themed rooms featuring handmade bathtubs and furnishings. At the Sapporo storefront-style erotic esthetic salon “Kairakudō,” one can play in rooms with shell-shaped beds or rooms with beds equipped with curtains. The storefront-style health club “Sophia” in Shinjuku offers rooms in which every interior design is different.
Concept rooms in love hotels and image rooms in sex establishments share the common purpose of being sexual spaces for enjoying the extraordinary. Variations such as Japanese modern, Chinese style, and SM-themed rooms, as well as fixtures like shell-shaped bathtubs and beds, erotic chairs, and claw-foot bathtubs, are also very similar.
However, beds shaped like vehicles—cars, airplanes, steam locomotives, and the like—commonly seen in love hotels are not found in sex establishments. There are love hotels with pools, water slides, or merry-go-rounds inside the rooms, but such features are unheard of in sex establishments. In terms of the richness of decorative variety and large-scale facilities, love hotels have the edge.
The exteriors of love hotels are often designed like castles or palaces. This is simply because they need to stand out. In this respect as well, they are virtually identical to sex establishments. In the sense that they are spaces that reflect the longings of people in each era, the two are likely the same.
A soapland with an exterior reminiscent of a white palace, projecting an extraordinary atmosphere and a sense of luxury (Takamatsu Castle East District, ’06)A drastic change in play styles in the 1990s
When the era name changed and the first year of Heisei (1989) arrived, image clubs began to spring up in entertainment districts. One of the factors behind this boom was the new Entertainment Business Law that came into effect in Showa 60 (1985).
Private-room massage parlors offering manual release, known as fashion health or private-room health, were widely thought to be unable to open new locations in most areas after the new law was enforced.
Contrary to expectations, however, these types of private-room massage parlors continued to open one after another. They were image clubs.
The reasoning was that “if a woman touches a male customer, it is considered a massage and requires notification. But if the customer touches the woman, it is not a massage, so no notification is necessary.” With this logic, sex-industry operators began running private-room massage parlors that incorporated image play such as groping, sexual harassment, and restraint. In the early days of image clubs, women were almost always in a passive role.
In the 1980s, SM clubs with image-club-like elements also appeared. Shops that had toys like rattles and a baby room where diaper play was possible claimed, “The customer only wants to be put in diapers and treated like a baby; he does not want to caress the woman. Therefore, this is not the sex industry.”
At the time, rumors circulated that “the authorities will not touch these kinds of establishments,” and as a result, such shops sprang up everywhere and filled the three-line classified ads.
The AIDS scare that began at the start of Showa 62 (1987) was also one of the factors behind the popularity of image clubs.
The panic over AIDS spread to entertainment districts nationwide, and customer numbers plummeted. Amid severe blows to the sex industry across the board, what drew attention were softer services. Unlike soaplands and the like, many image clubs at the time did not provide direct sexual services. It is said that some customers left fully satisfied even without any release. This was unthinkable in other types of adult entertainment.
However, in the 1990s, the content of play changed drastically. Women at image clubs, who until then had done nothing, began adding services such as oral sex and thigh sex, just like other types of establishments. This was because the sex industry has a tendency to actively adopt services that are popular in other genres.
Around this time, a typical time allocation was that the first one-third of the session was story-based play, followed by the remaining two-thirds as bed play. In the early 1990s, image clubs reportedly saw sexual harassment play as the second most common theme after night raid play.
Gradually, image play spread to other forms of adult entertainment, blurring the boundaries between genres and leading to increasing borderlessness. By the mid-1990s, image clubs had become firmly established as one category within the sex industry. Then, from the late 1990s through the early 2000s, shops equipped with unique image rooms that realized wildly imaginative ideas began appearing one after another, ushering storefront-style image clubs into their golden age.
〔References〕
Fūzoku Evolution Theory, Fumio Iwanaga, Heibonsha, 2009
Paris: Houses of Prostitutes, Shigeru Kashima, KADOKAWA, 2013
A Lifetime of Love Hotels, Tatsuo Koyama, East Press, 2010
Postwar Sex Industry Compendium, Keiichi Hirooka, Asahi Publishers, 2000
Chronological Table of the Sex Industry: Showa [Postwar] Edition, edited by Koji Shimokawa, Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2007
In addition, many other books and online media were consulted.
Interview, text, and photos： Akira Ikoma