Hotels in Japan with strange names

Today I spent some time being pedantic about how you classify hotels in Japan, and not just because I'm a pedant. Or because one of my hobbies is classifying Japanese hotels. Oh no. Part of my job involves long arguments about whether to class a hotel at Chitose airport as a Sapporo hotel, or a hotel in Chitose, or both, or something else.

(One of my hobbies is arguing the toss over whether Gatwick is really in London or not, but I doubt anyone reads this for the glamourous geolocation of airports.)

However, as I spent a relaxing few minutes perusing my Big List Of Hotels In Japan (nihon no hoteru no biggu listo), I spotted this gem: Hotel New Archaic.

It's in Amagasaki, a town outside of Osaka that is best known (according to Wikipedia) for a train crash, although I hope the existence of the Hotel New Archaic can change that.

After all, new archaicism has to be something special. The Hotel Old Archaic was probably decorated with samurai swords and you had to use a chamber pot, whereas I expect the Hotel New Archaic is stuffed full of 5Gb iPods, Friendster accounts and tamagotchi with flat batteries. Plus toilets that only have twenty or so different functions. It'll be like living in the Dark Ages.

If the Dark Ages were in the last ten years or so.

Then again, I'm not sure I want to go to a hotel full of new archaicisms. I had a terrible time at the Hotel Anachronism last year, and as for the Tautology Guesthouse, that was a nightmare. (Yes, it was true that breakfast is always served between seven and nine in the morning, except for when that's not the case, but that hardly makes it easy for me to plan my day.¹)

Of course, I had a friend who stayed at the Monaco Grand Contradiction last week. He checked out in March and he's still waiting for the bellboy to bring his bags up to his room.

No, he's not. Yes he is. No, he's not.

You can book a night's stay in at least one of the hotels that I've mentioned in today's post, by clicking on them. I've been tinkering with affiliate websites today, in the hope that they might offer some eventual payback for all the scribbling on this site. I don't expect to be able to retire on the proceeds, but if you fancy buying a book or a hotel room (and who hasn't thought of those two things as being intimately related) then I'd like to be of assistance.

¹ That was a joke for any logicians or analytic philosophers. If you didn't laugh, I'll come round and threaten you with a poker.