Which area of Japan has the most love hotels?

Have you ever wondered which part of Japan has the most love hotels in terms of population density? These are the kinds of questions that keep us up at night.

We found some data, recently shared online by translator Clara Kreft, that is perhaps surprising: it’s not the big cities full of horny young people that have the most love hotels (at least in terms of population levels).

It’s actually Miyazaki Prefecture on the southern island of Kyushu. Incidentally, the same prefecture is one of the areas of the Japan with the highest rates of syphilis.

The data say there are 5,670 love hotels in Japan, which is 5.39 per 100,000 adults. This number jumps to an impressive 14.08 in Miyazaki, where it seems that demand is much higher.

Though there are more prominent clusters of hotels in urban neighorhoods like Tokyo’s Shinjuku (Kabukicho), Shibuya (Dogenzaka), Ikebukuro, and Ueno (Uguisudani), this is because of their proximity to nightlife districts and major train stations. But the number of people who don’t live with family or roommates is still relatively high. In more rural areas, most young people will live with their families or even young couples will live in multi-generational homes. If you want some privacy, you have to go to a hotel. (Another, more cynical framing for the data is that there isn’t much for young people to do in a place like Miyazaki except screw.)

The prefectures with the next highest proportions of love hotels by population density were: Saga (13.28); Fukushima (12.5), Kumamoto (12.21), and Tottori (11.7). Overall, the data suggest that Kyushu and northern Japan has the most hotels when viewed in terms of their rate per population.

It’s not as simple as that the more rural the prefecture, the more love hotels. The lowest proportion of hotels in terms of population density was in Hyogo: despite its size and significant rural areas, the prefecture as a whole only has 0.84 hotels per 100,000 people. Its results might be affected by the presence of big cities in or near the prefecture (Kobe, for instance, while Osaka is also very close). Similarly low are Kanagawa (1.78), Aichi (2.7), Tokyo (2.73), and Saitama (3.35), though this is undoubtedly the result of having such larger and more diverse urban populations.

The original data is from 2016 and the posting was last updated in 2018, so the pandemic may have changed things. But given that there hasn’t been a proper lockdown in Japan and the desire to have sex is strong enough to withstand pretty much any socioeconomic change, our hunch is that the general trend is probably much the same.

In Tokyo, in case you are curious (we were!), the most love hotels are in Shinjuku, Taito, Toshima, and Shibuya wards, according to one love hotel listing site.