A rather naive man decides to nip off to Hokkaido to enjoy the Sapporo Snow Festival without booking a place to stay. Wandering the snowy streets, he eventually comes across a solution to his problem -- a love hotel.

This is a scene from the manga "Love Hotel," and the man, of course, is a foreign visitor. However, his depiction is not the work of a condescending Japanese manga-ka but a sympathetic Frenchman, Tokyo-based Frederic Boilet.

"Love Hotel," Boilet's first work on Japan to be published in his own country (in 1994), was an attempt to break down some of the stereotypes about Japan that many French had at that time, he says. "The theme is a Frenchman discovering the real Japan," says Boilet, who spent six weeks in Japan researching for that manga in the summer of '91. "At that time, images of Japan were still very backward in France -- kimono, yakuza, robots, that kind of thing. Few people had any idea about the everyday, human side of Japanese life."