But it lives on in the proliferation of rabu hoteru, love hotels, that line the highways around rural towns and branch off the streets of Tokyo like bedrooms at a high school house party. Inviting club-weary lovers or recently introduced lusters to get acquainted in a room decorated like a medieval European castle or a Sixties-era swank palace, they turn the concept of the two-hour nap into high art of the cheesecake school.

Because Tokyo's ultra-efficient trains stop running shortly after midnight, going out means going out till dawn. Double happiness means capping things off at a love hotel, or, for the unlucky, karaoke till the sun comes up followed by an early train. Each weekend in the Roppongi district, a stupefying number of monoglot American, Australian and other gaijin men, many of them poor to middling in sex appeal by Western standards, stumble away from the clubs with gorgeous Japanese women who speak little or no English. In the clubs, with the music loud enough to drown out conversation anyway, body language, hormones and notions of the "European-size" penis take up the slack. The love hotels go "no vacancy" with a quickness.

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