type of hotel developed in Japan that features many small bed-sized rooms
Capsules in Tokyo Capsule hotel in Warsaw, Poland. The lockers are on the left of the image, while the sleeping capsules are on the right. A capsule hotel (Japanese: カプセルホテル, romanized: kapuseru hoteru), also known in the Anglosphere as a pod hotel, is a type of hotel developed in Japan that features many small, bed-sized rooms known as capsules. Capsule hotels provide cheap, basic overnight accommodation for guests who do not require or who cannot afford the larger, more expensive rooms offered by more conventional hotels.
The first capsule hotel in the world was the Capsule Inn Osaka, which opened in 1979, located in the Umeda district of Osaka, Japan and designed by Kisho Kurokawa. The concept was conceived by Yukio Nakano, a sauna operator in Osaka, who wanted to offer customers who had missed the last train somewhere proper to sleep rather than on the sauna floor. He commissioned Kurokawa specifically because he had seen his Residential Capsule exhibit at the 1970 Osaka World Expo. From there, it spread to other cities within Japan. Since then, the concept has further spread to various other territories, including Belgium, Canada, China, Hong Kong, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Israel, Poland, Saudi Arabia, and South Korea.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).