The Akasaka Love Hotel (赤坂ホテル) is the most colorful of the three love hotels rotting side by side on the shore of Tamako Lake, and its rooms are pure Showa, old-fashioned in the most endearing way. Countryside love hotels like this boomed with the automobile: discreet parking, fanciful rooms, no questions asked.

Then tastes changed, the couples went elsewhere, and the roadside hideaways died one by one, leaving behind some of the most intimate ruins in Japan. A love hotel is a strange thing to explore: every room was designed to be somebody’s secret, and now the doors just hang open, letting the lake air redecorate.