The light background music would have made an excellent soundtrack for an anxiety dream set in a bouncy-castle ball pit. The glass doors slid open, revealing a small anteroom lined with rows and rows of bone-colored orchids. In the middle distance, high over the adjacent, empty theme park, hung a huge white Ferris wheel, which sat unmoving to a Muzak interpretation of the theme to 2001.įrom the outside, the hotel was white and boxy and modular, an interlocking assemblage that had obviously been clicked together onsite. The robot was at least 12 feet tall, with a waspish exoskeleton, plated in porcelain white, and a tiny head, as if it had compensated for microcephaly with circuitry of supercharged bulk. At the top of a slight rise I came around a bend to find a robot sentry standing watch. Beneath the Muzak was the screeching static of cicadas, and underneath that absolute silence. Even the park entrance’s show-tune Muzak was rendered sluggish by the humidity, reaching the parking lot in muted waves. The Huis Ten Bosch parking lot was oceanically vast and empty, filled only with air that wadded like cotton. The Japanese desire to save face makes omnipresent the threat of looping infinite regress, and it wasn’t fair to either of us to let it continue. I backed away, bowing, to spare her this potentially endless exercise. For my entire tenure at that counter, she was going to mark, with fear and hope, an arbitrary sequence of potential strange hotel locations. The Japanese language and culture do not distinguish between a guest and a customer-even, as in this case, a customer of somebody else’s hotel-so her inability to assist felt to her like a jagged tear in the social fabric. She did not know where one might find the hotel at the same time, it was a source of great shame to her to think she might disappoint a patron. “Can I walk there?” I asked, as if she’d specified with confidence a particular there. My journey had taken 24 hours, and I looked forward to interacting with no more humans en route to a dreamless sleep.īefore I could back away, she held up one finger, then marked a third place for good measure. I did a little Kraftwerk automation dance to clear things up, but it only seemed to alarm her further. The dual meaning, however, seemed lost on the Okura’s concierge, whose rigorous training hadn’t prepared her to counsel swarthy, disreputable-seeming, late-arriving foreigners in search of evolved accommodation. The name is an untranslatable double entendre: The literal meaning is “Strange Hotel,” but it’s very close to the word for “evolve” it’s designed to acknowledge the slight uncanniness that might attend the coming hospitality singularity. In rudimentary Japanese I asked where one might find the Henn-na Hotel. Even the employees of the resort’s Hotel Okura, a towering replica of Amsterdam’s Centraal Station replete with stone reliefs and mansard roofs, discovered themselves unable to come to my aid. But when I arrived at the Huis Ten Bosch theme park very late one humid summer night, just days after the fanfare of the robot hotel’s ribbon-cutting, nobody was quite sure where it might be found. The hotel, even before it opened last summer, had received extensive coverage in the international and domestic press for its promise of novel ease and convenience. It follows with perfect logic that the historical theme park’s newest lodging place is the world’s first hotel staffed by robots. So it ought to come as no surprise that on the western margin of the archipelago, on a serene bay in a remote area of the Nagasaki Prefecture, there is an enormous theme park dedicated to the splendors of imperial Holland. Japan has a national gift for holding in balance the stateliness of tradition and the marvel of novelty.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |