shashasha

The vanishing world of Japanese erotica

In the 2000s, Japanese photographer and editor Kyoichi Tsuzuki set out to document love hotels and the last remaining hihokan (sex museums, literally “house of secret treasures”) throughout Japan. Both love hotels and hihokan are relics of Japan’s economic boom years from the 1970s to the late ‘90s, their themes and designs reflecting the decadence of the Showa and Heisei eras.
Divided into two volumes, Tsuzuki takes the reader on a journey into facets of the Japanese sexuality. For “Love Hotels,” he photographed seventy-three rooms in love hotels across Japan—places that can be rented by the hour, designed and decorated according to different themes and ideas (of varying eccentricity) to create the right mood. In addition to love hotel rooms that reflect Showa and Heisei ideas of eroticism, Tsuzuki also includes several photographs of more recent love hotel interiors to illustrate the changing tastes.
The “Hihokan” volume features eleven such sex museums, which began to appear in the 1970s as Japan experienced a boom in domestic tourism. Loosely rooted in cultural traditions such as shunga (erotic woodblock prints), these places began as museums to display collections of sexual objects and oddities, and evolved into imaginative displays and stagings.

In addition to photographs, both books document their subject matter with additional text and information (in Japanese and English).