Travel Log: Day 81 (9/16), Tokyo Japan
Typical homeschool day. Lawson for breakfast and lunch.
We booked a capsule hotel for tonight just to try it out. The one we chose is Nine Hour near the Tokyo Tower, and the cost for all four of us was 18,430 yen (~$125.38).
This post will focus on the capsule hotel, but while we were out and about we thought we’d take advantage of that. We went from our capsule hotel to Shibuya scramble crossing again. We ate the conveyor sushi, and tried Karaoke this time. The Karaoke is a facility where you book a private room and buy a drink package. It was a great deal; for an hour and five drinks it was less than $20. We all sang some classics, and AC was a legend in her own mind. She swore she was hitting the high notes in Aerosmith “dream on” with the auto-tuned mic.
Getting There And Check-In
We took the JR lines to get to the capsule hotel. These train lines were a few minutes longer in total trip time than the subway, but involved a lot less walking. It wasn’t too busy at around 2:30pm when we left, and never got very busy during the ride there.
The check-in process was smooth. They just give you key cards that have the same number for both your bed and your locker. The facility is separated by men and women, including separate elevators, separate sleep floors, and separate locker room floors.
Locker Room
The locker room for the men was on floor #2, and for women it was on the 1st floor. In the locker room you’ll find your locker with your number which opens with a QR code. In the locker they have a bag waiting for you with sleep clothes and slippers. As far as I understood only the slippers were required when going into your sleep floor. BC and I didn’t wear the jammies.
The locker room also has the showers and sinks as well as some bathrooms.
Lounge
There is a coed lounge on the 10th floor which has tables and outlets. We mostly saw people using laptops, maybe working but who knows. As usual in Japan even the lounge was super quiet where you don’t feel like you can talk. There is an outdoor area off the lounge though which is where we went so we didn’t have to be so quiet. The lounge is the only place in the building where you can have food/drink, but it’s so quiet in there I swear eating would cause a scene.
Sleep Area
The sleep floor (#4 for us, #3 for AC/JC) is wall to wall and floor to ceiling sleep pods and not much else. There are bathrooms on the floor however. You are supposed to wear slippers here and be absolutely quiet since anyone could be sleeping at any time.
The pods were pretty roomy for me at 5’11” and 180 lbs. They are very simple inside with just one USB A charging outlet and a light dimmer switch. A privacy shade can be pulled at the opening to block line of sight into your pod. It blocks out light pretty well but does nothing to stop sound.
Once you’re ready to sleep you leave your slippers at the foot of your pod, crawl in, close your privacy shade and turn off the light.
The Overall Experience
If I had to give an overall assessment in a word, I would rate it interesting. It wasn’t good for a variety of reasons, but it wasn’t so bad that I would rule it out for future use. I’m not sure I even understand the intended use case for these things.
From a cost perspective, I would call it a slight ripoff. For one person this would be around $31 per night. Compared to a hotel, that doesn’t sound bad for a nightly rate. It’s not a bad rate if you are just using the capsules to bridge nights between stays at different places. When you think of it in weekly or monthly terms though compared to other options, that’s where it feels like a raw deal. On a monthly basis this would cost about $900. You could find a studio Airbnb for that with total privacy, your own bathroom, a kitchen, a real bed, etc. It’s no comparison at all when you consider you have to vacate the capsules from 11am to 3pm every day.
The sleep experience is pretty bad. The bed was hard in a bad way where my hip bones were hurting if I stayed in one spot too long. The pillow was awful. It was shaped like an ergonomic pillow but was lumpy and hard to get to the right depth and position. To top that off the place is pretty damn noisy until about 1am, even with everyone trying to be quiet. I heard people talking, dropping things, and accidentally banging things. It wasn’t until about 2:30am that everything was quiet and I was able to get a few undisturbed hours of sleep.
I don’t rule these out in the future though. The scenario where I would use a capsule hotel is if I just wanted to show up in Tokyo and then figure out lodging from there. I could just book one of these to buy time, using the wifi and lounge to figure out my permanent lodging.