What does 21st century London have in common with 1980s Tokyo? Think bubbles.
The Artful Lodgers, an article in yesterday's Observer, describes the current real estate boom in London in terms which evoke 20th century Tokyo. In some parts of London, house prices are currently increasing at the rate of £1 a minute. Shelter estimates that by 2026 only 35% of 30- to 34-year-old couples will be able to afford their own homes. In the face of this situation, people are turning to stop-gap solutions. They're living out of suitcases, couchsurfing, keeping their stuff out of town in storage units, getting their rent subsidized for guarding empty warehouses, living in higher densities (four to a room, for instance) and in smaller spaces, or just staying home -- sometimes indefinitely -- with their parents.
London and Tokyo are both the capital cities of small islands with dense populations, limited housing stock, and highly capitalist economies which aren't really run for ordinary people, even if ordinary people are still essential for running them. And even if they don't share a culture, common economic features give their citizens common problems.
"If I wanted to bring anyone back I've decided that it's either their place or not at all!" says London couchsurfer Nic Adams, who tiptoes around trying not to annoy the girls he's staying with. If he were in Tokyo, of course, there'd be a third option -- a love hotel.
Now, if London today really were just like Tokyo -- if economics alone determined outcomes -- British entrepreneurs surely wouldn't be missing such a gaping hole in the hotel market, would they? Surely, given the current situation in London, and given that things are only going to get worse for young people between now and 2026, one surefire use of London real estate would be to turn it into love hotels for couchsurfers and office workers?
What would these British love hotels be like? Instead of love seats, karaoke, porn vids, Playstations and jacuzzis, perhaps it'd all be red plush, dart games, turkey buffets under silver salvers. Perhaps you'd be able to dress up as a beefeater, play indoor golf or shoot clay pigeons before fucking. There'd almost certainly be fitted carpet around the toilets and a letterbox passersby could piss into, soaking a glossy heap of upmarket estate agent magazines.
Something vaguely similar is opening this spring. Yotel is a British chain of capsule hotels designed by Simon Woodroffe, who invented sushi chain Yo! Sushi back in the 90s (and has kept the maddeningly 90s font for all his projects). Simon got the idea on a British Airways flight. "I went to sleep with the conundrum of how to make a Japanese capsule hotel acceptable in the west and woke up realising the solution was around me: all I needed to do was find the designer of the BA first class cabin and ask them to help me design a hotel." You can see the results (and hear lots of London-as-Tokyo rhetoric from UK news channels) in this video.
But that still doesn't solve Nic Adams' problem -- where to take girls when you don't have your own bedroom? Yotel is a capsule hotel, not a love hotel. You can't rent it by the hour, and there are no sex toys.
If the British love hotel isn't really an imminent likelihood, it may be -- and this is where London and Tokyo have to part ways, agreeing to their economic similarities but unable to stomach each other's cultures -- for the reasons that Kelly Osbourne spells out in her recent series for ITV2, Turning Japanese. Forced by her sadistic producers to work in a love hotel, Kelly is absolutely disgusted by what she sees -- and smells:
"Imagine if someone came in an old sock and put it in the microwave. That's what it smells like," says the girl whose dad used to bite the heads off rats. "It's truly fucking sick... I feel like I'm getting gonorrhea just sitting here... I'll never go in a love hotel again, no fucking way."
Kelly may just be hamming it up, of course. But it seems like the love hotel, even in Japan, is a bit of an endangered species. Kyoichi Tsuzuki subtitled his photographic survey of their baroque interiors (the images on this page are his) Fading Beauty, and lamented that "for all the creative ingenuity, these love hotels are rapidly disappearing. Maybe even becoming extinct. One reason being that young people no longer go for these old-fashioned interiors, but the real killer is the New Public Morals Act, which governs the operations and standard practices of sex-related businesses".
JapanProbe confirms that the government is passing legislation to prevent new love hotels from being built on the famous hill behind Shibuya. Young Japanese don't seem too upset.
“I never even use love hotels," says one 17-year old boy. "If I’m gonna give a girl one, I do it at a manga cafe [where customers rent a private booth by the hour]. Keeping girls quiet while we’re making out in a store is an awesome thrill.”
A somewhat callous callow 18 year-old agrees. “I haven’t got the money to go to a love hotel, so it doesn’t matter to me. If I’ve gotta do it outside of the home, then I just go to Yoyogi Park. Because it’s dark there, it doesn’t even matter what they look like.“
Sex in manga cafes doesn't seem like it's going to hit Britain any time soon. But sex in public parks -- well, it's a great British tradition. There's your answer, Nic: get down in the park at midnight. It's illegal, uncomfortable, freezing, and free.
Hopefully this housing trend will eventually reverse, and cities will become affordable again like they did during the "white flight" of the seventies and eighties.
Will young artists (like me) be forced to move to "second string" cities like Barcelona, Pittsburgh,and St. Louis, because places like London and New York have sky-hight rents?
How are the rents in Berlin? And will Berlin still be affordable by the time I finish grad school in 2008?
I should have been a tech major, like my younger brother, now earning 65K and he's only 23.
The rents in Berlin are extremely reasonable, and almost 90% of the city rents; there's lots of accommodation available, lots of choice. It'll still be this way in 2008, yes.
If you're an American not attending a German university, Berlin's not really an option - if an American is wealthy enough to stick around, they can afford any rent in Manhattan. It's good if you have an EU passport, I guess.
What would these British love hotels be like? Instead of love seats, karaoke, porn vids, Playstations and jacuzzis, perhaps it'd all be red plush, dart games, turkey buffets under silver salvers. Perhaps you'd be able to dress up as a beefeater, play indoor golf or shoot clay pigeons before fucking. There'd almost certainly be fitted carpet around the toilets and a letterbox passersby could piss into, soaking a glossy heap of upmarket estate agent magazines.
It's all down to the definition of a love hotel in Japan. If you register as one then you face restrictions on where you can be located (not near schools etc). It is better, then, to just be a normal hotel and offer different rates. The majority of hotels used for "love hotel sex" are not officially love hotels.
You can be designated as a love hotel even though you don't register as such. If you have mirrors on the ceiling in the room or offer vibrators on the room service menu the regulators will have a word.
as a newly old fart who has accidentally had settling down thrust upon him very recently: the problem for ordinary people sorting out a place to live in london has nothing to do with a shortage of housing, it is a temporary influx of cheery and very welcome migrant workers from eastern europe who will mostly leave their rented flats when the stock market crrrashes, combined with unjustifiable and unprecedented wealth inequality. people are buying second, third, fourth and fifth homes to rent out. the answer to this problem is perfectly simple and has been known for a century: tax them. until that happens, fuck them all and fuck the world that made them rich. we haven't not noticed.
YOU MEAN JAPAN AND NON-JAPANESE COUNTRIES ARE DIFFERENT IN STYLES, CUSTOMS AND CULTURE? OH MY GOD THIS IS SO NEW AND FRESH A CONCEPT THAT I AM AGOG.
AGOG, GODDAMMIT. IF ONLY THEY WOULD MAKE TV SHOWS THAT EXPLORE HOW DIFFERENT JAPAN AND PLACES THAT AREN'T JAPAN ARE...THEN MAKE FUN OF THOSE DIFFERENCES, SOMEHOW. IN THE US, WE'VE ONLY JUST RECENTLY BEGUN EXPLORING THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN BLACK PEOPLE AND WHITE PEOPLE!
It is easy to see why you regard Japan so highly. The visual sense invested into even the simplest of objects is very appealing to (these) Western eyes. I spend a lot of time on Flickr and other photo sites just gazing at the architecture and the contents of people's kitchens.
This room in particular really does something for me. Ostensibly it's patterned on bland Western designs, but there is something in the precise details, the specific curvature and dimensions, I guess, that is wholly Japanese. Some of my favorite stuff to look at is the Japanese re-imaginings of medieval and 17th-18th century English and French styles.
I apologize in advance for asking this, but I must. That 'device' - at the foot of the bed - that appears to be two chairs facing each other (one noticeably larger than the other)...how/ why would one (or two?) go about using such a thing? Who's job is it to design such creations?
I'd imagine it vibrates, and that the person in the narrower seat penetrates the person in the wider seat, who is sitting up and spread wide. But I may just be a pervert; perhaps it's where you sit while receiving advice from a slightly husky mortgage counsellor.
I'm not sure love hotels will be disapearing anytime too soon. By and large hey're all pretty fresh and revamped looking like it's 1986 or something, the economic modus operandi has been revised, they operate more by shares rather than ownership and no signs of decay whatsoever. not in the cities, even less in the countryside. cost wise too they're really not much more expensive than a manga cafe.
Simon Woodroffe also plans a UK spa called YoZone -- a cross between an onsen, a nightclub and what we have here in Berlin, the badeschiff. The main difference is that -- surprise! -- British people won't be naked in YoZone as we are here in Berlin, or as they are in Japanese equivalents.
The spirit of Nagai Kafu is not happy to learn of the decline of the love hotel. "Things haven't been this bad since the war," he laments, "When the authorities began to clear up the pleasure districts because it was thought unseemly for such establishments to operate during such austere times. I remember now," he continues, growing misty-eyed, "The evening I visited the last of the old burlesque establishments on the night it was to close down. After all the girls had gone through their acts and thrown their underwear into the audience, they came back on the stage with the manager, who, with tears streaming down his face, thanked the audience for their loyal custom. The entire venue was full of the sound of men crying. I walked home to the Henkikan that evening with a tear in my eye and a new emptiness in my heart."
"Imagine if someone came in an old sock and put in the microwave. That's what it smells like," says the girl whose dad used to bite the heads off rats. "It's truly fucking sick... I feel like I'm getting gonorrhea just sitting here... I'll never go in a love hotel again, no fucking way."
Yah-hah-hah.
One of the first jobs I had after I left school (pre-AIDS, late 70's) was to serve drinks from a silver tray at posh orgies in Belgravia. I kind of liked my role, it was good fun. I had a kind of an Eton crop and wore a white tuxedo, with a napkin flung over my left forearm. It was a real laugh, but the stink was unbearable. I remember at one point someone slashed their wrists in the bathroom and it was considered my job to clean up the blood. I wasn't pleased about that.
Other than that, swanning around handing out dry martinis in a 4 story townhouse, with 150 Ruperts and Henriettas going at it like donkeys was, I thought at the time, a pretty good job.
(Apologies for being off topic...) I am going to move to a nature sanctuary today and start living a little "slow life" of my own for the next six months. I just wanted to say it's been lovely chatting with you. I'm going to miss all the good-natured hair-splitting!
Looks like paradise, Mandy--enjoy it, and then give us a full report! Give us a list of flora and fauna, especially if you encounter a hellbender. I used to visit my cousin in Ohio, and accompany him on stream jaunts. Things are huge.
In the meantime, I'll be doing my end in the NJ cedar bogs--it's almost orchid season, and the poachers are sharpening their spades...Hope I don't get Lyme again this year. Gets harder to shake off every time.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
imomus's journal
