We thought we had found a good hotel on the outskirts of Sapporo. Great reviews, a good price, and a room available during the Snow Festival. What we didn’t know was that we had booked a Japanese love hotel.
We arrive at Blue Hotel Octa, located on the outskirts of Sapporo, still completely unaware that it is a love hotel. This is our first encounter with Japan’s love hotels, where rooms can be booked for anything from a couple of hours to several days, depending on your needs. International booking websites such as Hotels.com, Booking.com, and Agoda rarely make it clear in their descriptions that a hotel is a love hotel. Instead, you often have to piece it together by reading between the lines of guest reviews.
As with all love hotels, the reception area is concealed to ensure that check-in can take place discreetly. At most love hotels, the reception consists of little more than a small window in the wall. Here, it is accessed via the parking lot, tucked away from the street. The lobby is dimly lit with a faint purple glow, and there is no staff in sight. Check-in takes place behind curtains, using a payment machine. We still have no idea what a love hotel actually is, so we start looking for someone on the staff who can help us check in.
We make our way to our room, still completely unaware. Just outside the room, tucked away in a secluded part of the corridor, there is a card terminal where guests can pay and book their room even more discreetly.
Once inside, we notice that the bed is raised on a platform and positioned in the middle of the room, like a stage set, with various props beside it. One of them is a massage wand. The room also features a large smart TV with an extensive selection of adult channels.
Inside the wardrobes, we find two different vending machines and an arcade game. One vending machine sells beer and highballs, while the other offers a range of sex toys, condoms, and lubricants.
The bathroom is spacious, complete with a large jacuzzi bathtub. However, it bears a few traces of previous guests in the form of long, black hairs.
By this point, we’re beginning to suspect what kind of hotel we’ve ended up in. We start regretting our decision to stay here for three nights and quickly begin searching for alternatives. The only problem is that Sapporo’s Snow Festival is underway, and almost everything is fully booked. Prices have also risen considerably since we made our reservation a few weeks earlier.
Feeling slightly panicked, we send Daniel down to reception to try to get a refund for our booking. Despite the staff’s extremely limited English, he eventually manages to get our money back after quite a bit of back and forth.
And then something almost unbelievable happens. A hotel that had previously been fully booked suddenly has a room available, and at exactly the same price as our love hotel. We leave Blue Hotel Octa behind and trudge through the snow to our new hotel, this time much closer to the city centre.
Our new room at KOKO Hotel suddenly feels both fresh and normal, and we’re grateful for its location, just a stone’s throw from the Snow Festival, the Susukino Crossing, and the Sapporo Clock Tower.
As it turns out, Sapporo had much more to offer than love hotels. Dimly lit bars tucked away on the fourth floor, nightclubs, and even courses for lesbians were all waiting just around the corner.
