Hanazono Room

Sun Mall Crest is located on Hanazono-dori (Hanazono Road), at the address 1-19-10 Shinjuku.^[5] It is across the street from Hanazono Elementary School and is accessible from Shinjuku-gyoemmae Station.

Although the Sun Mall Crest building was built and completed in 1988,^[5] the Hanazono Room and its pool was built sometime around 2000, when Japan was recovering from the Lost Decades, which was caused by the asset price bubble bursting in the 1990s.^{[citation needed]}

It became an apartment unit for actor Kōji Ishizaka,^[3] although he claimed that he lived just a floor below and the room actually belonged to another actor, Kon Ichikawa. Both actors have long since moved out of their units.^{[citation needed]} (Ichikawa died in 2008.)

At some point following their tenancies, P-Studio acquired the room and began renting it out to studio firms nearby. Due to its proximity to Japanese gravure and pornographic studios, and owing to smaller budgets resulting in limited choices for shooting locations, beginning in 2004,^[6] and by the mid to late 2000s, the indoor pool at Hanazono Room became frequently used as the background for swimsuit modeling photo shoots and low-budget pornographic films.^[7]

With stills from pornographic films of the Hanazono Room pool being circulated around the Japanese internet by the late 2000s, it became known as "That Pool" or "The Pool" in Japanese internet circles, particularly 2channel and Niconico.^[7] Not long after, news outlets also began referring to the pool as "That Pool".^[8] As the pool became popular in local media, P-Studio itself began referring to it as "The Pool".^{[citation needed]} In 2011, several segments from the tokusatsu drama Kamen Rider Fourze, which is targeted towards children, featured the pool; Japanese netizens soon noticed.^[3] With the massive spread of Japanese pornographic films on the internet from the early 2010s, "The Pool" earned a global following and became a well-known internet meme and gag.^[3]

After almost two decades of pornographic filming, on August 11, 2020, pornographic studios stopped using the Hanazono Room pool, and it was deemed to be "virtually prohibited" for adult video shoots. This was after P-Studio drastically increased the operating and maintenance fees for the pool due to the need to disinfect it of bodily fluids after pornographic shoots; this placed the operating expenses out of reach for pornographic studios. The pool is still being used for gravure modelling photo shoots and promotional trailers of pornographic films not otherwise taking place in the pool.^{[2][unreliable source?]}

• Pornography in Japan
• Chronology of adult videos in Japan
• San Francisco Armory, another pornographic filming site