Deja Vu

Home Sweet Capsule

Tags:

economics,

flophouses,

hotels,

Japan,

New York City

2009: The Japanese capsule hotel, long a favorite of travel shows and quirky guide books, first opened in 1979. By the early eighties there were at least ten operating hotels offering rooms between $9 and $13 a night in a space approximately six and a half feet long by five feet wide. (Twenty inches wider than a standard American burial casket, but six inches shorter.) Today there are dozens of capsule hotels in Tokyo, renting between $21 and $42 a night. Typically, these hotels are just waystations for businessmen who have spent the evenings drinking or gambling and missed the last train out to the suburbs. But the New York Times reports that since the recession began, some businessmen have been using the hotels more regularly, for weeks or even months, leading hotels to reduce rates for long stays.

The rent is surprisingly high for such a small space: 59,000 yen a month, or about $640, for an upper bunk. But with no upfront deposit or extra utility charges, and basic amenities like fresh linens and free use of a communal bath and sauna, the cost is far less than renting an apartment in Tokyo…

Still, it is a bleak world where deep sleep is rare. The capsules do not have doors, only screens that pull down. Every bump of the shoulder on the plastic walls, every muffled cough, echoes loudly through the rows.

Each capsule is furnished only with a light, a small TV with earphones, coat hooks, a thin blanket and a hard pillow of rice husks.

Most possessions, from shirts to shaving cream, must be kept in lockers. There is a common room with old couches, a dining area and rows of sinks. Cigarette smoke is everywhere, as are security cameras. But the hotel staff does its best to put guests at ease: “Welcome home,” employees say at the entrance.

1890: For the homeless and the permanently vagrant, New York City housing on the fly was plentiful and cheap, though lacking in amenities. Families of immigrants would be housed in apartments meant for one. (The 1879 Tenement Law required that every room in an apartment include a window that opened onto fresh air, leading to the creation of narrow airshafts between buildings, which were often used as makeshift garbage disposals.) Police stations had barracks located in their cellars which offered nothing more than a plank, and which were outrageously overcrowded in the winter. One step up from the police station were the flophouses, which offered a variety of accommodations for a variety of prices, detailed in Luc Sante’s classic book on turn-of-the-century street life, Lowlife. The adjusted prices for each accommodation are in parentheses.

Twenty-five cents ($6.10) bought the use of a cot, a locker, and a screen; fifteen cents ($3.66) paid for just the cot and the locker; ten cents ($2.44) for just the cot; seven cents for a hammock-like canvas strap hung above the floor; five cents ($1.22) for a spot on the floor itself. Some houses offered the full range of options; many others restricted themselves to the last one or two. Many flops contained bars as well, which sold various forms of rotgut or “smoke” or stale beer needled with ingredients that included denatured alcohol, malt residue, camphor, and benzene, so that at least some of the guests must have become permanent, if not eternal.

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