Capsule Hotels · 4

Neon supplies the outside of this building. Shinjuku carries signs on almost every frontage, and that light reaches the corridor windows without being anything the hotel switched on. Inside the capsule the supply is much smaller: a single lamp at the head end, under your own hand.

The capsule lamp reaches about as far as your arms do, which means the pillow, a book and the shelf beside your head. Beyond the blind, the corridor holds a low working light for people moving to the washroom. The street light stays on the glass and comes no further in.

There is no view here and nothing outside to light. No window belongs to the capsule, no lamp is aimed along the row, and the shared floor is kept dim on purpose so that one open capsule does not reach the closed ones beside it.

The corridor is the lit part. Its ceiling light is kept low, enough to read a number and find a step, and no more than that. Down at street level Ginza keeps its shopfronts bright, and that glow is what the building stands above rather than anything it produces.

The dim ceiling light falls on the walkway, the ladder rails and the edge of each capsule opening. It does not enter the capsules themselves. The shop light below stays below: it reaches windows and the pavement outside, and never becomes part of the sleeping floor.

The capsule interiors are not lit from outside. Nothing shines into an open bunk, and no lamp marks the row from end to end. The dark inside each capsule belongs to whoever is in it, and the corridor is dimmed to keep it that way.

Water gets the light here. The shared bath is the one room where the fittings are bright, and the tile sends most of that straight back into the air. Everywhere else the building runs on a great deal less, and the capsule floor is the quietest surface of all.

In the bath the light lands on the tiles, the taps and the surface of the water, so nothing has to be found by touch. In the changing room it drops to the benches and the lockers. On the sleeping floor it is only ever enough to walk a corridor safely.

Once the floor settles, the capsule row is not lit as a room. There is no overhead light on the bunks and no lamp along the aisle beyond a low guide. Each capsule keeps its own small light, and the space between them stays dim.

White light runs the shared parts of this address. Corridors, lockers and washrooms are lit evenly and without warmth, which is how the chain builds every one of its addresses. This is a separate address of the chain in Asakusa, and the scheme inside it is the same one.

That even light falls on the locker doors, the corridor floor and the washing rooms, so the whole route from door to bunk is legible without thinking about it. It reaches the mouth of each capsule and goes no further. The change from lit to unlit happens at the sleeping shell.

Inside the capsule there is deliberately nothing to look at. The shell is closed to light, and the point of the design is that the eye is given nothing once the screen is down. Nothing outside is lit either: the building faces the street and leaves it alone.