Back to Planet Tokyo, we had, by design, booked a night in a Japanese "capsule hotel," just because we had heard of them and were insanely curious about the experience. What we experienced in the end most certainly satisfied our curiosity for insanity.
First of all, FINDING the damned place was a pain and a half. We engaged in an epic quest comparable to the one for the Indian restaurant, only compounded by the fact that it was Tokyo, at the tail end of rush hour, and we were carrying awkward travel bags. After a merry chase across several subway lines we plumbed the heart of Tokyo's red-light district, where hawkers stood outside "massage palors" offering a good time with their girls to everyone BUT the two bedraggled, pushing-middle-age-tourist Gaijin in sweat-soaked clothing. Us, we were invisible...not the target clientiele, perhaps.
Yet another one for the "WTF, Japan" file?
After asking all manner of folk directions and wandering well into the wee hours of the night, we did eventually find the capsule hotel.
With signage like this, how could we possibly have gotten lost?
To cut ourselves some slack, a few factors HAD stacked the odds against us:
1. Despite the name, there is no actual GREEN signage anywhere on the Green Plaza building. The giant, building-high sign is blue.
2. The sign is entirely in Japanese.
3. There IS a very tiny, lunchbox-sized green sign with English on it It's blocked entirely by a potted plant next to the door.
Going inside we found a dark, empty lobby, where tucked away by an elevator in back was another sign, also bearing English, for the hotel, right above a sign for "Korean Pinko Pickpocket 24 hours!" Now, normally, raging bull elephants could not keep me from investigating something like that, but we were bone-weary from our day (remember, this is the SAME DAY we had been at the Hiroshima Peace Day ceremonies AND Miyajima!), so all we wanted was just to find our damned capsules and pass out in them.
When the elevator doors opened on the fourth floor, they revealed a dimly lit locker room and check-in desk where a small collection of drunk and tired looking middle aged Japanese businessmen all turned their eyes on us. Through a hilarious serious of translation mishaps (owing to both fatigue and the fact that, as mentioned, I had lost my freaking dictionary), we managed to get the "rules" of the place explained to us.
We were to turn over everything we had, INCLUDING OUR CLOTHES, to the reception staff, who gave us beate-up burlap yukatas (bathrobes) to wear instead. We were fordibben from leaving the hotel unless we filled out all manner of forms with the desk. But as long as we were there, we had full run of the many floors, which included an onsen, several smoking lounges, a restaurant, and many, many massage parlors, each advertising its own panoply of lovely ladies in Chinese dresses (oddly enough, the actual women wandering about these places looked much older, and less comely, than those in the photos). We were issued a wristband with a bar code, and anything we ordered to eat (and presumably, anyONE we ordered, should we have partaken in the messages, which we didn't, incidentally) got charged to our account.
In short, the whole enterprise seemed designed to keep drunk, exhausted Japanese businessmen off the streets, by institutional compulsion, and occupy them with various amenities until such time as they sobered up and were ready to go home or start the next day of work. Women were not allowed to stay here, although plenty of women staffers (tired, hard and bitter looking) were about, even in the (many) areas where the businessmen wandered around half or even fully naked, and everyone seemed to ignore everyone else. Even when not sleeping in the physical capsules, everyone was in his or her own "capsule" of the mind...other than the sound of spitting and late-night television, the place was almost entirely silent.
Josh referred to it as "a one-star version of club med," while I preferred to think of it as the instition from One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest meets Lost in Translation...Japanese purgatory, where lost souls in kimono wandered the halls, smoking and spitting (oh lord, the amount of loud, noisy expectoration, 24-7, from all quarters), getting food and getting massaged while they ate, all looking dead-eyed and listless and of course, unable to leave. "Welcome to the Hotel California, indeed.
(for those who read Cloud Atlas, the references we kept making to the "Ghastly Ordeal of Thomas Cavendish" never stopped)
The capsules themselves went on in stacked rows forever, down dark empty corridors monitored by videocameras. It was like a topiary maze of 1970s brown pastel plastic, or a First Person Shooter game where you wander empty halls until you happen upon a shambling Japanese businessman, whereupon you unload with your BFG. It's silent as the grave down there except for an electronic hum, because who knows if someone's sleeping, so you have to be courteous. Each capsule was just larg enough to accomodate just one body-length, on a cushion, and you can look up and watch a small black and white pay per view TV whose channel selection is pretty much limited to NHK State News and porn. There is a light in your capsule should you wish to read, and a battered puke-brown windowshade you can pull if you do not wish to see even the eternal artificial twilight of the corridor.
We slept surprisingly well.
Despite our fears, we were indeed allowed to leave with our clothes the next day. We had sampled the restaurant (fair to middling), the onsen (might have been nice without all the loogie spitting old Japanese dudes), but not the massages...somehow that seemed like "eating the food in the town of ghosts" that henceforth would have bound us to that strange demon realm forever.
I accidentally stole their pen, though, so I may well have to come back some day.
At that very moment, the 80s band Foreigner walked by and said, "Hey, I guess we're still big in Jpan, guys!" They then proceeded to launch into "I want to know what love is" until hauled off by the Yakuza.
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