Hot Take: Capsule Hotels in Japan Are Not Good For You (Here's Why)
If you know about the travel and the tourist side of Japan, you would know about capsule hotels. If you don't know about capsule hotels, they're mainly known in Japan to be a special type of accommodation that has many small, bed-sized rooms that are a size of a time capsule.
Many travel vloggers from around the world raved it as a sci-fi necessity if you want to go to the big cities such as Tokyo and Osaka. They talked highly of capsule hotels like it's the next generation of accommodation in Japan.
For example, there are vloggers that raved about it being minimalistic and just right for people that don't want a hotel to be luxury or want to have "the simple things in life."
However, for many people that lived in Japan for almost their entire lives, capsule hotels are not used for vacations at all.
As someone that has went to Japan before, I've learned about capsule hotels even before I went to Japan for the first time back in 2018. After reading and learning about how they work, it's just not for me at all, and I would only use it for emergency situations.
So, here's the three harsh realities of using capsule hotels so you can reconsider being too minimalistic on your travels, plus the actual reason why Japanese people would use capsule hotels.
Reason #1: Daily Lockout Ritual
As I recall, many vloggers and travel influencers would be speaking highly about the capsule hotels because it's super convenient and minimalistic for either solo travelers or traveling with your closest friends.
However, what most of them don't tell you is the daily hassle of staying in a capsule hotel for more than one night rather than just use that as an emergency situation before you go back into your primary hotel.
Most capsule establishments require guest to check out every single morning, take all of their belongings with them or re-lock their luggage in communal lockers, and check in again later on that evening.
So, think about it for a second. The moment you wake up, you have a time limit to get your belongings and leave the place. Plus, from morning to evening until you get to re-check in again, you're all on your own while carrying your belongings as well.
The thought of it alone would make me annoyed at best because you're all on your own with your belongings and it'll be a hassle to go anywhere with them until the evening when you can check back in again.
Instead of having a cozy room to leave your clothes in, unwind during the mid-day, or drop off your shopping bags, you're just evicted for several hours each day you go back to a capsule hotel.
And I know what you're thinking:
I don't want to pay for an average hotel because it's expensive to go to. So capsule hotels makes sense.
Yes, it's more cost efficient, but just constantly getting kicked out would piss off a lot of people because the routine of waking up and leaving in the same morning and coming back to check in on the evening would be tedious to do after a couple of days.
Reason #2 Sound Isolation and Little Privacy
If you don't mind checking in and out of the capsule hotel, then think about having to deal with tons of sounds and not much privacy in a single night.
Capsule doors are not solid soundproof doors; they're usually fabric blinds or plastic screens pull-downs designed to barely meet local Japanese fire code regulations.
So that means you're just sharing a massive bedroom of 30 to about 60 strangers in one night.
Because it's not soundproof, that means every cough, sneeze, blasting music or videos, rustling plastic bag, alarm, gossip talking, and snoring echoes to the entire room. Good luck sleeping from that....
Plus, because capsule hotels have fabric blinds or plastic screens, people around the place would see your belongings. So if you bought something embarrassing, people will see it and there's almost nothing you can do to fully hide it.
You would feel a lot more exposed than you ever had in the trip, and you won't have a lot of personal space that's necessary for you to fully relax.
If you are a light sleeper or value genuine privacy, spending multiple nights crammed into a plastic pod will leave you SEVERELY sleep-deprived, physically and mentally burnt out before your trip even reaches its midpoint.
Reason #3: Physically Demanding
Depending on the time of the year you go to Japan, it can be a physically demanding if you added a capsule hotel to your itinerary. The reason for that is for a lot of Western tourists, it'll be a more claustrophobic environment to deal with since you feel a lot more restrictive than the average hotel.
Plus, it'll be even worse for people that are deemed taller or larger than the average tourist. The bigger than average tourists would have a harder time to adjust physically in a capsule room because it's designed to fit in the average Japanese person.
Remember that you would have to check out in the morning? So from morning to evening, you would have to walk around the city or wherever in Japan, which a lot of Americans are not fully used to walking for about 15,000 to 25,000 steps per average day in Japan.
So to go from walking around that many steps to getting back to a small rectangle box to try to get some sleep in? That take a huge toll in your body for the next morning and the cycle will continue until you go back home.
Capsule are not the ideal place physically since a good amount of space for an average hotel room would do wonders for your body compared to a small box to sleep in for the night.
For how affordable business hotels are in Japan such as APA (highly recommend), it's pointless for you to deal with the daily physical toll of a capsule hotel.
Real Reason Behind Capsule Hotels
The real reason behind capsule hotels is basically they're used for emergency situations such as missing the last train or you don't have enough money to go back to your primary hotel.
Japanese salarymen frequently used capsule hotels when they work late hours, missing the last train, or have a drinking party with their coworkers (nomikai).
Also, it's for people that are facing severe problems personally and/or financially who require a secure, affordable space for a short time before they get back on their feet.
Imagine this, you're barely getting by and having to go to a capsule hotel to save what little you have, and people outside of your country are raving it like it's the next big thing.
I am not fully saying it's a bad thing to rave on something that you don't see everyday. There are tons of things in Japan I would rave about, but the main reason as to why it was created in the first place: to make it a quick and convenient to survive for the next day rather than make it an affordable accommodation for your entire trip.
Conclusion
Capsule hotels remain a brilliant, hyper-efficient piece of Japanese urban infrastructure when you're stranded in Shibuya or Shinjuku at 1am with no train home. But treating them as a quirky, long-term budget hotel alternative will degrade your entire experience of Japan.
I can understand that money's tight, but capsule hotels is not the immediate answer to have a budget trip to Japan.
Respect the capsule for what it truly is: a temporary emergency shelter for when things don't go your way, not a primary hotel.
Have you ever stayed in a capsule hotel? If so, what was your overall experience?
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