As a kid, I read about unusual hotels in Japan, where people slept in tiny boxes instead of rooms.
On my recent trip to Tokyo I decided to try it out for myself for one night.

What you see here is about forty rooms, each one sized like a big fridge made to lay flat, sized
some 1,2 x 1,2 x 2,2 meters. The ones with closed screens and slippers outside have sleepers inside.

It was an interesting experience, no doubt ... Still, I think that during my next trip I will stay in a more traditional Japanese room


PS: one of the comments below mentioned greed. But I would have to disagree with this. First, it
seems to works all right for the locals (I was one of very few foreign guests). Second, for a hotel
in Tokyo, this is a fairly economical way to spend the night, at about 60 Euros (although for another
30-40 Euros you could stay in a standard business hotel, in a normal room. Like almost everything
in Japan, everything was very neat and clean, if a bit unusual for a European :). And finally, my
impression is that this type of hotel is mostly for last minute emergencies - for those who missed
the last train, needed to work till wee hours, etc. Better to have such an option than not have it.

Even though not where I stayed, there is a chain of capsule hotels in Japan called 9h (ninehours).
Here is how they describe their business model:

Business trips, travels, or overtime work. What features are required for overnight
stays in urban hotels? Resetting your day, from one day to the next, needs three basic actions:
take a shower, sleep, and get yourself dressed. We simply replace these actions with
the time spent: one hour + seven hours + one hour. Based on this most straightforward concept of
staying in a hotel, ninehours offers ideally simple urban stay unlike any other in the world.