THE NIGHT HAS gone well. The meal was delicious, the drinks went down like nectar and the talk was smooth. John looked sharp as a tack, Jane glowed like a moon-lit beach and, when they slithered across the boards of the dance floor, like two pieces of a well-oiled dancing machine. Now they sit in the car, basking in the heat of love in a confined space wondering: what next?
It's a problem as old as Cupid's grandmother: where to go to get it on. In some countries, the pursuit of the demon love has led to furtive midnight excursions across creaking floors in mum's house, sweaty hunts for an empty room in a party full of drunks, and gymnastics in the back of a car. Floors, couches, even dewy fields have been pressed into the service of Eros over the years.
Japan has developed a much more civilised solution: the love hotel. In a country where space is at a premium and where most young people still live with their parents, the demand for cheap venues available 24 hours is high. Many Hong Kong people in similar living conditions can appreciate the need.
Privacy is prized. There's no registry book, and even in the dwindling number of hotels that still have flesh-and-blood receptionists, a curtain screens their faces from bashful clients. Inside, every inch of the hotel is designed to cater to their patrons' raging libidos.
'I go to love hotels because there's nowhere else to have sex,' says Ayumi Fujii, a 19-year-old office worker who uses the hotels 'about 10 times a month'. 'I live with my mother, father, and my older sister and the house is small so there's no way anything is going to happen there.'
Since evolving from inns known as tsurekomi (bring your own partner) after the second world war, there are now more than 30,000 love hotels in Japan. A 2004 estimate by industry watcher Vitamin Miura claimed that about one million people visit love hotels every day, making them part of a multi-billion-dollar industry.