Love in Japan

riding packed trains, many of my friends lamented the notoriously slow romantic advances of the Japanese male. After all, who has a month to wait to hold hands?

This physical reticence doesn’t apply to hostess bars, however, where men pay copious amounts of money to women, whose sole purpose it is to serve them drinks, laugh at their jokes, praise their intelligence/virility/looks and generally pretend to be thrilled to bits by their clumsy flirtations and drunken karaoke ballads.

For those “courtesy chocolate” recipients who simply can’t get their romantic acts together, there are also “kitten” restaurants, where you can get a little cuddle time with something small and furry. Alternatively there are also “hug” restaurants where you can exchange chaste hugs with other lonely hearts in need of a little human interaction.

Others get their romantic endorphin rush in other ways. Like the chap who broke into my friend’s apartment, not once, but twice. While her electronics may have tempted a different kind of man, this one was interested in only one thing — her underwear, which he promptly “knicked”, along with photos of her. Even before she realised she’d been robbed, her panties and pics were probably already packaged and headed to the seedy underbelly of Tokyo to be sold in a vending machine.

There are those who get it right, though, and for young lovers in Japan, the next biggest holiday after Valentine’s Day is Christmas.

While New Year’s Eve in Japan is a solemn occasion, when people spend time with their families and pay their respects to their local temples, Christmas is revered as a day for lovers to, well, get it on. I’m not sure how the church would feel about that.

And in a country where accommodations are cramped at best and often shared with many generations of the same family, the solution for some merry lovemaking is to check into your nearest love hotel. With rooms rented by the hour, discreet staff and an even greater collection of vending machines, with all sorts of tools and toys of the trade, love hotels are ideal for some muchneeded nookie.

They also serve a useful purpose for those of us who will travel three hours to the nearest big city for a night out, and need a place to crash for a few hours before the first train home the next morning.

It’s beneficial to have brushed up on your Japanese sexy lingo prior to a visit, however, otherwise you may have the unfortunate occurrence of renting a room for some shut-eye only to open the door and find not carpets and a bed but rather a metal grid on the floor and nothing but a dentist’s chair! Romantic root canal, anyone? — Nicky Furniss is the Senior Editor at TCB Media