Sex and repression in modern society: Japanese love hotels.

Fusing themes running through yesterday's posts on hotel design and eroticism in the everyday object, we take a peek onto the increasingly sophisticated sub – genre of hotel design: love hotels. In high density cities such as Tokyo, privacy is difficult to come by. Although the city is not unique in seeking a solution to this most human of difficulties, it has spawned a interesting type of hotel that has long since transcended the purely functional to explore the full gamut of human fantasy. Love hotels have now spread well beyond Tokyo and are now an attraction in their own right. In this selection of images compiled by trendland no attempt is made to filter the rooms in terms of aesthetic taste, but rather they illustrate the escapist fantasies of hard-pressed workers of a particular society in a dense, modern metropolis. Some people might find one or two of the images distasteful, but the common theme here, the transgression of rules forming the basis of society, were long-since formulated in the ground breaking work of anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in his book Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1927). What makes love hotels interesting is their increasing acceptance in Japanese society and elsewhere as that raises the question of where the new boundaries of transgression will shift to.