Shibuya Sepia..

Messing about with my iPhone, Shibuya looks great in sepia..

The infamous Hotel Lumiere..

The Hotel Lumiere, located in the middle of a Maruyamacho street full of love hotels was the unfortunate location of a woman's death at the beginning of last month. She had checked in with a man in the early morning hours of Jan 8, and her body was found in the bath at around 4 pm. I was walking through the area when her body was found, and while I didn't know what was going down, the amount of police, detectives, and emergency vehicles that filled the surrounding streets made it obvious that it was something pretty horrific. As a completely unrelated piece of useless information, the hotel is situated around 100 metres from where the Shiespa pump room exploded in the summer of 2007..

Street Walking..

Shibuya supposedly doesn't have street walkers, but there are enough girls walking to and from the small fuzokuten to the nearby hotels to safely assume that the cover of night doesn't always betray the the purpose of the ladies within it. Recently I've seen a couple of attempted pick ups, from guys that would usually get the old 'I'm calling my boyfriend on my keitai' brush off, and they seemed to be able to open up a dialogue pretty well on the backstreets of Dogenzaka...

Festival Lanterns in Maruyamacho..

My last summer festival post, I promise..

Took me a while to work it out, but the lanterns which adorn the streets of each locale at festival time are actually sponsored by the shops and vendors that live in each area. This particular Maruyamacho matsuri base, which was in a tiny little park in the middle of the love hotel district, had lanterns with the names of many love hotels and small restaurants which populate the area. Most noteable of which was the lantern from "2 Sweet Ass", which despite the fact that it could easily be well suited as the name of a love hotel, is actually a restaurant!!

Random night shot.. 09

Shopping in Maruyamacho, sex and vegetables..

Inside love hotels.. 04

So many hotels, such little time.. Seriously though, cheap Romanesque statues aside, this mid-range of the hill's finest has a definite Western classical twinge to it, not unlike something you may find (the gaudier hotels of) in northern Europe..



More and more hotels provide the lone hunter with every opportunity to find company that modern technology is able to provide..



And when in Rome..

Inside Love Hotels.. 03

Who designs these places??

Cosplay Hotels

Cosplay is well documented as being a Japanese institution, it permeates into the decor of society so naturally that you eventually start to not even notice it. At the more famous end of the scale of course is the manga or gothic orientated style, which is usually well represented in places like Harajuku or Akihabara, but it goes further than that. Certain love hotels offer cosplay rental as a way to spice up the experience, of course the schoolgirl uniform is used as the advertising default, closely followed by the nurse, race queen and maid outfits, and I'm pretty sure it gets a lot spicier than that..

Inside Love Hotels.. 02

Hotel Fifteen Love, situated somewhere down near the lower end of the scale..

Hotel If..

Another in the Love Hotel series, Hotel If is a mid to low range example of the hotels that are clustered together in Shibuya, this one being just off the street that houses Club Asia and the O-East venues..

Inside Love Hotels.. 01

Intoducing a new series documenting the elaborate and sometimes intriguing decor of the lobbies of Love Hotels in Maruyamacho..

Hotel Beat Wave:

Love Hotel Hill.. 02

As you delve deeper into the belly of Maruyamacho, hotels just keep popping out of the side streets, as do the couples going for some private time!

Random Night Shot.. 04

Maruyamacho..

Love Hotel Hill..

I don't know why this area is referred to as such, it's more like a slope. This little street takes your into the heart of the hotels, it's also the way you go to Womb, and is just off the street full of clubs (Club Asia etc..) that borders Maruyamacho and Shibuya. It's also the same corner from which I took this pic..

Wild One

Continuing my series of documenting Shibuya's seedier side, here is Wild One. A classic porn shop in the middle of the love hotel and fuzoku-ten district in Shibuya.. The orange building on the right is a Yakuza controlled brothel, technically called a fashion health. The whole block is full of them, seedy bars, and love hotels..

Womb by day..

Actually, a lot of the people that frequent the popular hard-house Shibuya club Womb do probably see it in the early morning light, as they leave, but there's a good chance most of them can't remember what it looks like.

As an aside, given that this location is in the middle of a cluster of Love Hotels, what do you think those guys are gonna do with that tripod?? :)

For all and sundry, here it is...

Maruyamacho Y

Every so often when you walk through the love hotel district you come across some S class big body benz, all tinted up and obviously attending to business. Once we even came across a whole group of yakuza middle men guarding a bosses car outside a seedy hotel. They were wearing their sunglasses at night, we kept walking.

This is how they roll..

Somewhere somebody's daughter.. 03

..has just been videod!

To briefly explain these "Somewhere somebodies daughter" posts, it's not uncommon to walk through this neighborhood and come across a group of people taking video or stills of a cute young girl (or girls) for Japanese AV. These guys were just finishing up and were right in the middle of the 'Pink' area which is full of hotels and men's 'fashion health' establishments.

It's probably not your daughter though so... ;)

Maruyamacho

Woke up in a new place this morning and took a walk. It amazed me how different a neighborhood just 4 blocks west of where I had been living for 5 years could be. Maybe it was the sunshine, maybe it was the fact that I had the day off, maybe maybe maybe... In any case, Maruyamacho is very cool, great pictures everywhere..

As an extra piece of useless information, Maruyamacho is a kind of old part of Shibuya, and is also where the main concentration of love hotels
are, so there are lots of happy couples, girls on a 'go to' mission, and enough dodgy lookin dudes an sharp black suits to make you realize that there is a whole lot of interesting stuff going down in this here hood..

Rikko Kasso: Tokyo Undresssed

I have been a fan of Rikki Kasso's Tokyo Undressed photo blog for some time now. He is a Tokyo based photographer/artist/film maker that lives in Shibuya and takes pictures of (amongst other things) gorgeous japanese models in various states of undress. He somehow manages to capture a certain kind of sexual energy that emanates from Shibuya in a way that I really admire, and for that reason I recently ordered (and just received) his book "Tokyo Undressed". Check out his blog..