Japan's love hotels are attracting interest from more than just couples looking for a place to spend a few private hours.
Investors are also interested; this vast market seems to be proving more resilient to the recession than luxury business hotels.
There are about 25,000 love hotels in Japan which are visited an estimated 500 million times a year.
Clustered around train stations, they are doing a brisk business despite the worst recession in living memory.
Flamboyantly designed and exotically named - Hotel For You, Sunpalace, Asian P-Door - they offer rooms by the hour, euphemistically marketed as a short rest or a longer stay.
Contact with staff is kept to a minimum. This is a business that runs on discretion.
Some have underground car parks and entrances, while others provide screens to shield visitors' number plates.
Plenty of customers are using love hotels to indulge in affairs or to meet prostitutes, although many are couples looking to escape the narrow confines of Japanese apartment living.
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Providing privacy is big business in Japan. The love hotel industry is huge, estimated to turn over about
£25bn ($40bn) a year.
And hotel owners claim they have been barely touched by the recession.
"Of course some hotels did [suffer], but not love hotels," says Joichiro Mochizuki, an executive with a company which runs a number of love hotels, including the Asian P-Door in Tokyo.
"Not like city hotels, not like business hotels - for this love hotel we had a 3-4% drop but otherwise we have kept a 400% occupancy rate."
That means each room is, on average, used four times a day.
eeeeeeewww!
The sheer variety on offer for couples is huge. There are mock castles, perched by motorway intersections.
One love hotel is decorated on a theme that combines soft toys and bondage. In others, visitors can dress up as doctors and nurses.
Some rooms look like school classrooms or train carriages.
There's even a love hotel for fans of the film Titanic, shaped like a cruise liner with life-size statues of Leonardo di Caprio and Kate Winslett on the prow.
With 25,000 across Japan, there is one to suit every fantasy.
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