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. Garish and instantly recognisable in Japan's grey concrete landscapes, the hotels blow giant neon raspberries at the prudish and have become as much a part of the country as karaoke boxes and the bullet train. Many are monuments to kitsch, with bright facades, fur-lined corridors and rooms themed to 60s music, Hollywood stars, UFOs, dodgem cars, S&M and prison cells. Outside, some resemble churches, Egyptian temples and Roman coliseums, watched over by King Kong, ET or the Statue of Liberty, with names such as Pink Oasis, Gay Paris and Little Chapel Christmas. Every evening, couples can be seen wandering the love hotel areas of Tokyo, Osaka and other big cities, shyly discussing where to go. 'We're not that fussy as long as it's clean and inexpensive,' says Taka, a university student who was looking for a hotel on a recent Friday night in the Dogenzaka love hotel district in Shibuya. His girlfriend, Kanako, wants something cute because she's going to take a photo of the room with her mobile-phone camera. 'I'd like to keep it as a memento,' she says with a giggle. 'I compare rooms with my friends.' Like Taka and Kanako, the majority of love hotel customers are in their teens or 20s, but there's a good sprinkling of middle-aged love-birds and older folk drawn to their attractions. 'We quite often have people in their 70s here,' says Hiroshi Yoshitomi, who manages the Le Chateau in Kanagawa prefecture, west of Tokyo. 'You never know who's going to turn up these days because there are more and more divorced couples and healthier older people.' Once fairly seedy establishments catering mainly to prostitutes and their clients (including US soldiers during the occupation of 1945-51), love hotels have cleaned up their act. In the 60s and 70s - often considered the hotels' tacky heyday - owners took huge steps to attract Japan's growing urban population. A three-hour stay in a room with a vibrating bed, velvet walls and disco lights was for millions of Japanese the first step to marriage and children, sometimes not in that order. A 1985 law attempted to segregate hotels into 'sex-related' and 'lodging' categories, forcing many unlicensed establishments to throw out the chains, mirrors and revolving beds that gave them much of their kitsch flavour. And, with increasingly emancipated women more likely to share the cost of a room, many hotels have also ditched the testosterone-heavy themes (cowboys, aliens and racing cars). These days, it's women who typically shop for hotels before a date, either online or in one of several glossy magazines that cater to the trade. This trend means the term love hotel is fading, replaced by the more pleasant-sounding 'fashion' and 'boutique' establishments, boasting fake art, cuddly toys and French decor. The evolution has led to much confusion with conventional hotels, but the short-stay option, advertised in neon signs outside along with prices per stay, is still a dead give-away. Family-owned hotels, with a seen-it-all pensioner sitting behind the counter taking money and handing out keys, still exist. But Le Chateau is fairly typical of the plush establishments many love hotels have evolved into, attracting foreigners and more paying women customers. From the car park to the automated room hire, guests don't have to deal with staff. Cars are screened from the road by a barrier and the hotel even provides plastic shields to cover registration plates. Every soundproofed room, which guests select from an electronic panel of photographs, is equipped with a television (including 24-hour adult movies), DVD, bath and a machine that dispenses sex toys. Another control panel dims and changes the colour of lights, and selects music. At the end of a three-hour tryst, the customers deposit 7,000 yen ($458) to 8,000 yen into a machine that resembles a parking meter. Hotels elsewhere in Japan often charge for shorter stays of one to two hours, leading to inevitable jokes about the sexual stamina of Tokyo folk. Behind the fur-lined walls, however, an army of personnel keep everything running smoothly. Most rooms in good love hotels are turned over three times a day, which means a mountain of cleaning and washing. On the busiest periods of the year - holidays, Valentine's Day and Christmas Eve (a huge dating event in the Japanese calendar), turnover can double. 'Very few of these hotels lose money,' says Le Chateau's Yoshitomi. 'But you have to achieve an occupancy rate of at least 200 per cent a day and to do that you must make the customer happy.' That basic philosophy and the country's libertine approach to sex, means that basically, anything goes. However, the industry has its dark side. Some hotels still cater to various services of prostitution such as 'delivery health', a sort of dial-a-prostitute service that has swept Japan's sex trade. The anonymity prized by the industry helps cover the tracks not just of furtive teenagers and adulterous couples, but also men who pay to sleep with schoolgirls. One estimate in 2001 claimed that one in 20 secondary schoolgirls have engaged in escort services, usually in these hotels. 'If you want to know how society is developing, you should hang around love hotels,' says Takahisa Suenaga, an investigator with the Galu detective agency in Tokyo. He's spent years working on divorce cases, which takes him most weeks to the love-hotel districts of Shibuya and Shinjuku in central Tokyo. 'You can see how divorce is growing so fast in Japan just by looking at who goes in and out of the hotels,' he says. 'It used to be mainly teenagers, but now more and more middle-aged couples visit them. And the age of some of the kids I see going into these hotels shocks me. If they were my children, I would send them home. I once saw a man going into a love hotel with his 17-year-old daughter. I was tailing the man because his wife thought he was having an affair. I can't tell you how hard it was to tell his wife.' Some believe the industry may eventually have to develop methods, such as identity checking, to deal with such threats, but at the moment the trend is towards more, not less anonymity. In the newest hotels, sightless robots greet couples in a chirpy voice, take money and credit cards and guide them to their room. The bored granny receptionist will eventually go the way of the water bed and disco lights. The new robots typify the technological evolution of the love hotel, some of which now come with plasma TVs, virtual saunas and laser shows. For those who don't get distracted, somewhere in among all the clutter is a good old-fashioned bed. 'Sometimes I wonder where it will all end,' says Yoshitomi.