The last time I went to Japan, we stayed at Capsule Inn Akihabara, a capsule hotel. I’d never stayed in one before, so it was definitely an experience.

Capsule hotels cater to salarymen and so are male-only usually, so it can be hard to find one that accommodates women too. This particular one was in a really good location, only a few minutes walk from Akihabara station, and it’s quite clean (eh, everything in Japan is spotlessly clean) and well, exactly as advertised. I felt slightly smug about the fact that the rates for women were slightly cheaper than for men.

After you pay at the check-in counter, you get this velcro wristband with your locker key and room key on it. You go to your assigned floor (separate floors for men and women) and chuck your stuff into this microscopic locker. I’m impressed by the fact that they fit two lockers together like L-shaped pieces to save on space. Good idea.

The room where the actual capsules are is automatically locked – you need that key on your bracelet – so at least you don’t get patrons wandering from floor to floor. You can choose whatever capsule you want, and because it’s a women’s floor, it was pretty empty and I got my pick. Ray wasn’t so lucky in that regard. Apparently it was quite busy in his room.

While there are bathrooms on each floor, they only contain toilets and sinks. For the shower areas one needs to go to the shower floor, which is the top floor. Along with the shower room, there are also general rec rooms where smokers smoke. This was very annoying as it stunk up the whole floor quite terribly despite the ventilation units.

Anyhoo, as you can see the capsules themselves are reasonably spacious, about the size of a single bed. You can see a metal handle at the top of the capsule – that pulls down the blinds for privacy when you sleep. There’s a little shelf by your head so you can put your mobile or spectacles or whatever, with a control unit below it to control the temperature, lights, radio, alarm clock and TV – the last item of which you can’t use unless you feed the machine some coins. The whole dashboard is in Japanese of course so unless you read katakana you might be out of luck, as Ray was, because he couldn’t turn on his capsule light.

The pillow is one of those mini Japanese-sized bean-filled, or in this case, chopped up little plastic pipe-filled pillows. Don’t worry, it’s actually quite decently comfortable. The quilt was warm enough and the mattress though thin and firm wasn’t too hard. Then again I’m used to hard so your mileage may vary.

The last photo right is of the small foyer area. The main area is raised – as usual one removes ones shoes and stores them in the shoe lockers at entrance and the key is held by reception who uses it as a sort of deposit. There is a kitchenette, and 4 computers with internet access that is free for patrons to use.

All in all, a very good experience. I was happy with the accommodation and had a restful night.

Oh – and I’ve just had a look at the current room rates and they’ve just gone up! They are now 4,000 yen for both men AND women. I could have sworn they were somewhere in the vicinity of 3,500 yen for women and 4,000 yen for men before. Ah well. -shrugs-