Capsule Hotels

The nine hours concept is stated plainly in the name: an hour to wash, seven to sleep, an hour to get ready. The Shinjuku-North property applies it with the group's usual severity. Everything is white, everything is labelled, and the routing from lift to locker to shower to pod is designed so that you never have to make a decision while half asleep.

The pods themselves are moulded units with controlled lighting and ventilation, stacked two high along quiet corridors. Because the design brief was sleep rather than novelty, the fittings are unusually calm: no screens, no clutter, no reason to linger anywhere except the bed.

Day-use rates and hourly showers are available, which is what makes it genuinely useful in a district where a lot of people find themselves at four in the morning without a train home.

The Millennials treats the sleeping unit as one part of a larger building rather than the whole product. Its pods, called smart pods, include a powered bed that reclines into a sofa and a projector aimed at the ceiling — a small amount of theatre, but also a practical way to give a single guest somewhere to sit that is not a shared table.

Downstairs the lounge is set up for daytime work: long desks, power, coffee included, and a bar service in the evening that draws people out of their berths at a predictable hour. The building runs at a sociable pitch that the more clinical capsule hotels deliberately avoid.

For central Kyoto, where hotel prices climb sharply in the two main seasons, the trade of private square metres for shared ones is an easy one to justify.

First Cabin borrows its vocabulary from aviation, and at Haneda it does so inside the airport building itself. Units are described as first class or business class cabins, larger than a standard pod, tall enough to stand in, and closed with a rigid shutter rather than a roller blind. There is a hanging space and a proper luggage footprint, which matters when the whole point of the stay is a flight.

Large communal baths and shower rooms sit off the main corridor, and the front desk operates around the clock because arrivals here are governed by flight schedules rather than by the working day.

It is a functional building rather than a beautiful one. What it offers is the ability to walk from a late landing to a bed without leaving the terminal, and to walk back again before a dawn departure.

Anshin Oyado is aimed squarely at people who work in the city and stay overnight often, and it has been refined accordingly. The capsules are conventional in shape but generously specified inside, and the corridors are kept dark and genuinely quiet, with staff enforcing that rather than merely requesting it.

Where the property distinguishes itself is in the shared floors: a large bathing area, dry saunas, massage chairs, a lounge with free drinks and light food at certain hours, and enough locker space that guests are not living out of a bag on the floor.

Several branches operate on a men-only basis, so the admission policy is worth checking against the specific address before travelling. The trade-off it offers is consistent: no private room, but very little else given up.