The spires of the Espo World (Love) Hotel (エスポワールホテルベル [1]) at dawn, across the river from historic Tojinmachi in Kochi, Japan. Photo by Nevin Thompson.
A recent survey has ranked the top ten strangest “love hotel” names in Japan. Coming out on top? “Banana & Donut.”
@daitoshonagikai [2] バナナとドーナツってラブホもよくこの名前にしたなって思いますw pic.twitter.com/1bBoNL9HJo [3]
— Alice@熊本城マラソン2月19日 (@ab_k2) December 12, 2016 [4]
“Banana & Donut” is the perfect name for a love hotel.
“Banana & Donut,” which as recently as 2013 was ranked as having only the tenth-weirdest name [5], is a “love hotel” (known as a ラブホ [6], or rabuho in Japanese) in Saga Prefecture [7] in western Japan. Visitors to such hotels pay per hour or for an overnight stay, typically for a private place to have sex. Some tourists to Japan have discovered, however, that “love hotels” are an affordable alternative [8] to conventional hotels.
Like similar establishments outside of Japan's big cities, Banana & Donut is located on a highway bypass [9] on the outskirts of town, and according to its website, besides providing private rooms, also offers raffle draws [10] for useful household gadgets, room service [11] and coupon discounts [12] for frequent visitors. There is also a porn shop [13] (link may be Not Suitable For Work) where costumes and adult novelties can be purchased as part of your stay.
“Love hotels”, with their by-the-hour rates, serve a variety of purposes. In a culture where it's uncommon to entertain guests at home, the hotels provide a neutral space for intimate encounters when dating; in a country where most houses lack insulation or central heating, they are a warm refuge in winter. There's also the idea that these hotels provide a convenient place to retire for an illicit tryst — and most of them provide guests with private parking spots, or at least some way of obscuring the car's license plate number from prying eyes.
Since “love hotels” all serve a common purpose and market themselves to a similar consumer demographic in generally the same geographic area, they rely on memorable names to stand out from the crowd and help generate business.
Goo Ranking, working with Research Plus [14], polled 500 Japanese people [15] in December 2016, to come up with some of the strangest (and most memorable) “love hotel” names [16] in the country:
実在するラブホ名
1位バナナとドーナツ
2位と、いうわけで。
3位ホテルだぞぉー
4位暴れ狸の鬼袋
5位べんきょう部屋
5位101回目のプロポーズ
7位オラオラ
8位甲子園ジュニア
9位北アフリカ
9位つれてって～
11位ポニーテールは風にゆれて
12位さりげなく！— リフォロー100%相互フォロー支援 (@redpanda678) January 2, 2017 [17]
Actual names of love hotels:
1. Banana & Donut (バナナとドーナツ)
2. ‘As I was saying…’ (と、いうわけで)
3. It's a Hotel, You Know… (ホテルだぞぉー)
4. The Raging Racoon's Enormous Sack (暴れ狸の鬼袋)
5. Study Hall (べんきょう部屋)
6. The 101st Marriage Proposal (101回目のプロポーズ)
7. Oi! (オラオラ)
8. Koshien [18] Jr.甲子園ジュニア
9. North Africa (北アフリカ)
9. Take Me With You… Please? (つれてって～)
11. A Ponytail, Blowing in the Wind (ポニーテールは風にゆれて)
12. Nonchalance (さりげなく)
While many of the hotel names seem so whimsical as to be almost incomprehensible, some have a tenuous connection to reality: “The 101st Marriage Proposal” (101回目のプロポーズ), for example, was a television series [19] in 1991, in late bubble-era [20] Japan.
The 101st Marriage Proposal hotel itself [21] is located in the pleasant tourist town of Kurashiki, in western Japan, on Japan's Inland Sea. Images from Google Street View [22] demonstrate the privacy guests can expect when checking in, and the overall romantic atmosphere of the hotel.
Goo Ranking, which gets its name from a little-used search engine [23] and web portal based in Japan, bills itself as Japan's “biggest domestic ranking site” [24], having published more than 50,000 surveys. The company generally collects its results through Internet surveys [25], and the results often appear in news reports and other media. The long-running English-language blog, What Japan Thinks [26], frequently posts translations of its surveys on a variety of topics.