japanese business hotels are pretty nice places. when you're looking to travel inexpensively, or when you miss last train, you have a pretty decent shot - even in tokyo! - of finding a perfectly serviceable room for 5000y or so.
it's by no means cheap - 5000y buys you a whole lot of Poiful jelly-bean-like candy from the local grocery store - but compared to, say, America, it's a good value for the reassurance that absolutely nothing notable will happen during your entire 16-hour stay inside the building, which as a bonus will inevitably be connected to a Family Mart or something
but let's say you, for whatever reason, decide impulsively to stay an extra night in the middle of Japan because you're there on a rare occasion, are packed light, and heard of a neat retro game museum that you can only check out on certain days of the year. you want to stay somewhere in a private room, but don't want to pay 5000y, because you recognize that is the price of Kirby's Return to Dream Land Deluxe for the Nintendo Switch
do you have options?
as it turns out, there is the Minimum Viable Hotel
the Minimum Viable Hotel (actual hotel name unmentioned), is, to me, a liminal space that exists on the very boundary of things that are not hotels (net cafes, capsule hotels) and things that are hotels (business hotels).
it is a hotel so stripped down to what is undoubtedly the legal definition of "hotel", that at first impression, it is very unwelcoming and suspicious; but the more you think about it, the more you realize just how impressive it is to provide the exact minimum of functioning Hotel Stuff and not a single millimeter further
it offers, in what I would generously call a 2-tatami mat room
- a door you can lock and bolt (your room is at the end of a hallway that is less wide than the corridors on sleeper trains)
- a futon on box springs, with comforter and pillow
- a bathtowel, toothbrush, and disposable slippers (for use in the two showers located on B1F of the hotel, accessible by the one elevator)
- a bathroom and water heater (in a shared space on each floor; there is not a sink in the traditional sense but a tile area with faucets coming out that feels like the thing you wash your hands in before phys ed in anime)
- like a 16 inch TV, and an outlet for charging (2 if you unplug the TV)
- a functioning air conditioning unit (it rattles a bit if you turn the heat up too much, but if you set the angle of the fan to fixed, the rattling is minimal. use this because there is no heating in the shared corridors)
- a pull-string operated ceiling light (and a flashlight for emergencies)
- a folding stool, hangers, and a trash can
- a microwave (somewhere in the hotel, according to reviews; I don't remember it but it's probably on the first floor by the side entrance you go into with your key after the front desk shuts down for the night)
the front desk is manned for checkin from 16:00 to 23:30, and checkout (at 9:00!) is performed by leaving your room key in a small 100yen box from daiso pinned to the wall in your room. the hotel offers exactly zero services. it explicitly will not hold your mail or your luggage.
yet it has, as far as I can think of, every basic amenity a normal hotel offers (albeit with some being in shared spaces), except all the extra space has been vacuum-packed out of it. it is hotel.zip that you downloaded off a rapidshare clone that made you click through three link monetizers. a 140p youtube upload of a hotel captured through one of those terrible third-party phone screen recorder apps that records audio off your microphone.
it is not by any means an Enjoyable experience, but it is an Enough experience for one night, and you can feel secure sleeping in a room at a price tag cheaper than "8 hours night pack in a locked net cafe room with unlimited ice cocoa".
oh, and the retro game museum I was going to check out closed in 2016, and is actually currently just a private collection waiting to find a space. check the dates on the articles you read
[daily writing for 2023-03-02]