The Hotel Gaia is a large abandoned love hotel in rural Chiba Prefecture. I saw it on a few Japanese language websites and decided to pay it a visit at the end of 2015.

The hotel stands by a backroad amidst a small patch of forest. When I made my visit, another love hotel on the opposite side of the road was still open for business. A third hotel once stood about 200 metres up the road from the Gaia, but it had been demolished a few years before. The remains of the Hotel Saturday Afternoon are about a kilometer up the same road.

Like many rural love hotels, the Gaia consisted of a collection of separate cottages. The hotel was divided into distinct front and rear sections, with separate office buildings, and quite different styles of architecture. An underground tunnel connected the rear office to the rear cottages, but did not extend to the front cottages. I noticed that some ashtrays in the rear cottages bore the name Hotel Satsuki rather than Hotel Gaia, and began to wonder if the two sections were in fact separate hotels. However, I noticed that the pnematic tube system in the rear office also connected to the front cottages, and concluded that the entire complex was a single hotel. Some online research revealed that the place used to be called the Hotel Satsuki, but changed its name to the Hotel Gaia. Perhaps the front part of the hotel was built first, and the rear part was a later addition.

In any case, I will devote separate articles to the front and rear sections. The Hotel Gaia was the most interesting love hotel that I've ever seen, either in ruins or still in business, and I have too many interesting photographs for a single article.