Lastel hotel in Yokohama – A real Heartbreak Hotel

It’s the place where your mourning relatives can check you in when you check out of life – a real Heartbreak Hotel.

Nestled away in suburb of Yokohama in Japan, the bizarre inn looks much like any other of the city’s small lodgings.

But this is no normal hotel, it is a hotel for the dead.

Room with a view: A staff member at the Lastel hotel in Yokohama, south of Tokyo, attends to one of the guests

The 18 guests are all corpses, tucked up in refrigerated coffins for 12,000 yen ($157) waiting their turn for one of the city’s overworked crematoriums.

Yet unsuspecting young couples still come knocking at night, looking for a place to stay.

‘We tell them we only have cold rooms,’ owner Hisayoshi Teramura said.

Mr Teramura is cashing in on death which has become a rare booming market in the stagnant Japan economy.

Last year, 55,000 more people died than the previous year and over the past decade, an average of 23,000 more people have died each year in Japan.

In 2010, according to government records, 1.2 million people passed away, giving the country an annual death rate of 0.95 per cent compared to the global average of 0.84 per cent.

Booming business: A monk walks past the corpse hotel in Yokohama