Japan is cheap, Japan is fun, Japan is beautiful, Japan has the best food in the world. So why not go on holiday there? After all, everyone else seems to be. I wrote about this here, but a small news story by Robin Harding in today’s FT makes the trends in the country pretty clear.
Back in 2010 there were 6,259 ‘love hotels’ in Japan (these are themed hotels in which you can rent rooms by the hour). Today there are only 5,940. That’s a fall that partly reflects the drop in the number of young lovers in Japan: the number of people in their twenties fell from 18 million in 2000 to 13 million in 2013. So five million fewer people need to escape crowded family homes for the odd intimate hour here and there.
However, it also reflects the need to create accommodation for the surge in young foreign visitors (who like to stay in hotels for more than an hour a day). Entrepreneur Hiroshi Kozawa has created the Khaosan brand, which he is using to buy up love hotels in Tokyo and convert them into cheap hotels for backpackers – bunks cost a mere ¥2,000 (£10) a night.
So there you have it.
That’s one more reason to visit Japan sooner rather than later: the love hotel experience – which has long been on gaijin must-do lists – might not be around for much longer. The lower the yen goes (and we reckon there’ll be a ramping up of Japanese QE again soon) the more tourists will arrive and the more love hotels will turn into cheap hostels for Chinese shoppers.
It also gives us a nice new economic indicator: as one of my Twitter followers suggested this morning, if we want to judge the success of Abe’s drive to open up Japan to tourism, all we need to do is count the love hotels.