For those of you who don’t know what a Love Hotel is, it’s basically an establishment that rents rooms by the hour so that couples can enjoy some alone time in peace.

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These places are far more popular in Asian countries where people typically live with their parents before getting married, thus making it harder to get some decent shagging in before settling down with a partner. Of course, they’re used by all kinds of people from young lovers to people having affairs to travellers in need of somewhere cheap to stay the night. In Japan Love hotels are one of the country’s biggest industries, raking in an estimated $50 billion a year.

Photographer Bob Thissen finds Love Hotels a fascinating subject, particularly those that have become abandoned and unused, as it presents a conflicting mood to the one that is portrayed by a working hotel. One of Thissen’s recent discoveries was this establishment on the outskirts of Tokyo and as you browse through the images, you can start to imagine the various stories that would have unfolded behind its closed doors:

For more photo sets, check out these images taken from inside the abandoned Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital in South Korea.