A Night in a Capsule

[Written 13th May 2009]

I just spent my first night in a capsule hotel. I crawled out blinking at 9am with a dry throat from the recycled air and was confused after a night of heavy dreaming. I could have slept another few hours but after 10am the capsule hotel charges 500 yen an hour - I didn't want a lie-in that badly.

The night before I'd had a nice meal with some friends I'd made during my stay in Osaka [see blog entry " A Long Day in Osaka"] and it was a very late evening when we'd finished so I was forced to stay in a capsule - the hostel being shut up.

When I'd heard capsule hotels being described, I'd always imagined them to be quite futuristic - but my lofty dreams of an automated utopia were promptly grounded as soon as I walked into the building. From outside it did look quite modern, but inside - more like a greasy spoons in the style of Fawlty Towers with smoke yellowed walls. It was grotty, stank of stale cigarette smoke and was full of the kind of men you'd see in betting shops all hours of the day - smoking, unshaven and in their own small private worlds. The reception looked like it had been the same since early 1982, and that when it was built in 1982 it had been going for 'that 70s look'.

Everyone smokes everywhere in Japan, and though McDonald's will occasionally offer glass partitioned smoking rooms that's the exception to the rule. This hotel was a positive fug of cheap tobacco wafting through stale recycled air - each breath drained my energy. I checked in at 2am and was quite tired and just wanted to sleep. I was not prepared for the strange customs that you're expected to follow at a capsule hotel.

After filling in a form, totally illegibly, I was told what to do and given two keys. Neither of the keys was for a room in which to lock either yourself or your things. The first key was for a shoe locker - inside was a pair of well worn slippers with your 'capsule' number scribbled on them in black marker pen. You are to leave your shoes in this locker. Wearing my wonderful smelling slippers, I took the lift to the 4th floor to discover my second key was for a locker to lock my things in. I felt like I was about to go swimming, not to bed. The locker was no way big enough for a back-pack so I had no choice but to spoon my bag the entire night.

Once I'd rejected using a locker I went from the locker room into the capsule room. The capsule room itself was about 40ft long and 2 beds high on each side and resembled giant beehive honey cells. Half were empty - I could tell because the bamboo curtain was not drawn across the end. From other capsules came thin sodium light and others hearty drunken snores. I located my capsule and explored.

In a way it was futuristic - or at least it would have been if you were from 1973. I'm sure in the 1980s [when it seemed to have been built] a capsule with an all in one TV, FM radio and alarm clock control panel would have made the Space Shuttle program seem archaic. But now, the whole thing felt like a plastic coffin with an inch thick foam mattress. It was constructed from what was like two plastic baths facing each other to form a capsule in the middle. At the end there was no door - just a bamboo curtain which could be rolled down and hooked under a metal peg. This was not the ultra-modern Japanese capsule I had expected.

At any rate, I was somewhere warm where I could sleep - "Ok" I thought, "what's on TV?". Channel One: Sumo. Pretty cool...then it finished. Ok, "let's see what's on the next channel...". I stopped and starred in horrified silence for a good minute. It was, what I can only describe as 'Hard Core Kissing'. There were pornographic close ups of a woman sucking a man's tongue and plenty of chin-dribble licking. As if this wasn't enough, additional slurping noises had been dubbed over the top, supposedly to enhance the visual feast. It was so weird. I'm sure I'll never truly understand why anyone would watch that - or even guess why it would be broadcast. The people who made it were supposedly filling a niche in the market - but how or why anyone would find that an erotic site I hope I never know. I suppose I can forgive the people who made it - just making a living I guess. But I'd love to meet the person who's job it was to create and dub slurping sounds over the top, just to look them in the eye and slowly shake my head.

So I turned off the TV, set my alarm and stretched out [as best as I could with a back-pack at my feet] and spent my first, and hopefully my last night sleeping in a plastic tube in the company of drunken snoring Japanese men.