Nine Hours is as removed from that image as any hotel with coffin-sized rooms could be. Although it's situated near Kyoto's beautiful, traditional geisha district of Gion, the hotel is relentlessly clean and futuristic, with monochrome décor and minimalist iconography. It seems less suited to drunk salarymen than clinical robots in a Björk video.

One hour to get ready, seven hours to sleep, one hour to get up

The hotel's name refers to the idea that you'd only need to spend nine hours there — a radical concept in a world of lodging that offers a host of amenities to tempt you away from the place you're actually meant to be visiting. But the people behind Nine Hours believe you're better off spending as little time as possible under their roof: just one hour to get ready for bed, seven hours to sleep, and one hour to get up in the morning. Of course, the timing isn't strictly enforced — guests can actually stay up to 17 hours a night, which costs just ¥4,800 ($49).

None of this is to say that the time I spent at Nine Hours was uncomfortable. Quite the opposite — the interior was immaculate, and the hotel's sleeping pods are carefully designed to induce ultimate relaxation. Each is fitted with a Panasonic-built sleeping system that gently lulls you to sleep and wakes you up at a set time by modulating the light.

This is relaxing for each individual guest, but more importantly it's less abrasive to the others with whom you sleep in such proximity. The capsules are amazingly comfortable — even for someone like me who's 6 foot 4 — with more space than the average single bed, high-quality sheets, and a crescent-shaped pillow that curves around your shoulders.

Nine Hours is almost entirely devoid of color. The signs and text inside are color-coded by gender — red for female, black for male. Since there are separate floors and even elevators for men and women, just about the only splash of color I saw was the Nine Hours-branded, curiously bright green shower gel in the bathing facilities, which otherwise looks like Dieter Rams' long-lost blueprint for a hot spring.

This dogged dedication to minimalism isn't always for the best. The automatic lights in the bathroom, which you'd think would remove that unnecessary process of pressing the switch yourself, are a little too eager to turn off if you linger too long without making sudden movements. The elevator is so quiet and smooth that I honestly thought it was broken. And the standard-issue Japanese-style sleeping clothes, while comfortable, perhaps hinted a little too strongly that I'd been abducted by a futuristic cult.