Pre-order Kyoichi Tsuzuki - Love Hotels

Baron is pleased to announce the reissue of Kyoichi Tsuzuki’s photobook Love Hotels. It is now available as a coffee table edition. This volume preserves Tsuzuki’s important documentation of Japan’s love hotels.

 

In the early 2000s, editor and photographer Kyoichi Tsuzuki set out to document a disappearing part of Japanese urban life: retro love hotels whose interiors blended fantasy and eroticism. By photographing seventy-three rooms with distinctive décor—rotating beds, mirrored ceilings, and themed interiors—Tsuzuki preserved a record of a world being reshaped by changing tastes, regulations, and commercial pressures.

 

Love hotels, or rabu hoteru, have a long history in Japan. They first emerged in the late 1950s, partly in response to restrictions on prostitution, and expanded in the 1970s as spaces for privacy and erotic fantasy. Their interiors frequently embraced spectacle, with designers exploring inventive shapes, lighting schemes, and thematic elements.

 

Over time, many of these elaborate designs have disappeared. Fire and safety regulations, along with changes in social norms and hotel economics, have encouraged more restrained interiors. Subdued colours, minimalist décor, and a focus on comfort are now more common.

 

The significance of love hotels goes beyond décor. They provide privacy and space for intimacy in a society where many adults live with family and urban apartments are small. Tsuzuki’s photographs, combining images from the early 2000s with more recent ones from the 2020s, show a shift: from flamboyant, playful interiors to more restrained and uniform designs. What is lost, some argue, is not just a style of décor but a form of social and erotic imagination, a space for experimentation that is increasingly hard to find in contemporary Japan.

 

The book also contains an introduction by historian Euphemia Franklin.

 

Artist Bio

 

Kyoichi Tsuzuki, born in Tokyo in 1956, worked as a freelance editor from 1976 to 1986 for the influential men’s fashion and lifestyle magazines Popeye and Brutus, contributing articles on contemporary art, design, urban living, and related cultural subjects. From 1989 to 1992, he published Art Random (Kyoto Shoin), a 102-volume series documenting global contemporary art trends of the 1980s.

Tsuzuki continues to write and edit works on contemporary art, architecture, photography, design, and related fields. In 1993, he published the photobook Tokyo Style (Kyoto Shoin), offering an unvarnished portrayal of the living spaces of Tokyo residents. In 1997, he was awarded the Kimura Ihei Award for his photobook Roadside Japan (Aspect, 1997), which initiated a long-term project documenting roadside subjects both within Japan and internationally.

 

150 Pages

34.5 x 29 cm

Hardback

First Edition of 1000

Pre-order delivery spring/summer 2026