Japan's Capsule Hotels & Micro-Stay Culture

About this book

The complete English guide to Japan's capsule hotels — not a novelty list of quirky places to sleep, but the whole institution: the pod as a designed object, the makers and houses lineage by lineage, the building around the pod from shoe box to great bath, the craft of the small night, the formats in their settings from airports to snow country, the people and the manners that keep a hundred strangers quiet, the history from the metabolist cell and the 1979 Osaka opening to the design turn, and an honest handbook that also says when a capsule is the wrong room.

Every entry is built in the same four movements — what it is, the culture around it, finding & staying, and care & the official check — and no entry is a booking directory or a ranking: the format itself is the subject. Rates, house rules and facilities are never asserted as fixed facts; every entry closes by naming its own official source, the house's or operator's official page, where the current fact lives.

Eight parts: the pod itself · the makers & houses · the building around the pod · the craft of the small night · formats & places · people & manners · history & design lineage · staying well.