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.