March Madness in Japan is a bit different than it is ‘Murica – not about sports, but days off. April 1st marks the start of the new fiscal year at most companies, which means plenty of new hires, resulting in super crowded everything – made only worse by people flying around the globe to see cherry blossoms, because the ones in their own country apparently aren’t good enough! (3.08 million in March alone… FFS!) It also means that employees get a new bunch of vacation days, which is good and bad, because at most companies you can only take over the ones from the previous year. The ones you have taken over previously will vanish – but since sick days are not common in Japan and you don’t know when the rona or the flu will strike you down (which tends to result in mandatory staying home until you get cleared by a doctor!), you don’t want to take too many personal days off, because if you reach negative days, you have to live with pay cuts. Japan… Keep spending most our lives living in a worker’s paradise. People who have kids or are regularly sick for other reasons are usually not affected by this, but a lot of salarymen seek to take remaining paid vacation time at the end of March before the days vanish on April 1st.
One of them was yours truly. 2023 was rather busy for me, so I had 6 vacation days from FY2022 left as I would only be able to transfer the new ones from FY2023 to FY2024 – plus a national holiday and weekends resulted in a total of 17 days off in March. So I used the second half of March to create long weekends and did some domestic traveling. I actually logged 30 locations in March alone, everything from relaxed 10-minute-long outdoor shoots of abandoned vacation homes to intense several hour long indoor-outdoor explorations of large abandoned places. In-between I had to take plenty of public transport – and by chance I came across three trains that might be of interest to railroad buffs. (Plus a bonus one in April…)
When walking up to Kochi Station I saw the Anpanman train, which is going back and forth between Kochi and Okayama – I only had a short time before it left, so I quickly grabbed my camera and took a few snapshots while the train started to move. A week later I was going to Tottori, when by chance I boarded a train with a special Detective Conan design – not just some decals outside, but a fully designed train. Walls, floors, headrests, even the window blinds. I haven’t seen a single episode of Detective Conan, but I must admit that the train was pretty cool. No extra charge, at least I’m not aware of any. Last but not least there was a train with kagura design – a dance with Shinto origins and demon masks. I saw it one morning at the opposite platform just before leaving, so I took some quick shots again. (Bonus: In April did two day trips to the Kansai countryside and found myself on a train with Expo 2025 decals – an expected shitshow with a strangely appropriate hemorrhoid looking mascot. I’m not a fan of the creature or the event, but maybe some train buffs will get a kick out of it.)
Now that I have your attention, if you actually read this far, I would like to repeat two things I’ve mentioned before and that are really important to me:
1.) I tend to pay rather close attention to urbex in Japan. I usually know if a place got vandalized or demolished, if it collapsed or is reused. When I leave out that information in my articles or social media postings, you can be 99.9% sure that I did so for a reason. The same applies for when I use made-up names for a location. I’ve been there, I’ve seen it, including the signs that are usually all over the place – often painted in letters so large that even Brian would stop in awe. So if you have information that is not mentioned by me, please don’t post it in the comments – there is a 99.9% chance that the information is left out for a reason.
2.) NEVER EVER ask me for the coordinates of a location unless you know me well enough to do so in person or unless you have very good reasons. “I’m a lazy tourist shmock who has never done urbex before, but I REALLY want to go to that spectacular original find you just posted, because Japan is this magical wonderland where none of my actions have consequences!” is NOT a good reason. It’s a reason to ignore you – or to block you, if you didn’t get the hint the first or maybe second time. I can do my own research, so can you! I believe in you! All of you! Every single one of you!
That doesn’t mean though that I am opposed to meeting people or doing collaborations, despite plenty of bad experiences over the last dozen years or so. Blackcrows for example was a true pleasure to work with, which resulted in this amazing video:
On the other hand, I get some really some creepy and / or entitled messages. I try not to interact with crazy or lazy, but some people are weirdos that should be banned from being online. For the first few years I had an amazing audience with 99% positive and supportive responses. Things started to go south a bit with the tourism boom to Japan in the mid-2010s – since the pandemic though people seem to just let the craziness flow. Everything from confused-stalkerish to a passive aggressive follow-up after I didn’t respond to somebody’s request to do research work for them within 36 hours during a work week. I was about to post some anonymized messages, but then again… why? Better not to trigger lazy or crazy… (If you think I’m too sensitive, please don’t forget that I live in a country where expats and immigrants discuss whether it’s a microaggression when they get a compliment about their eating with chopsticks skills… You see fewer snowflakes in a Hokkaido winter than among foreigners in the big cities.)
I don’t mean to be mean, but this blog is a one-person hobby. I take every photo, I write every single word of text, I handle my own social media accounts – there is no editor, no co-writer, or any form of contributor… and especially no management, which some of the for money urbex tourists roaming the planet use to organize their trips. I just want to have a little bit of extra fun with this, after the most important part – the actual explorations. Even the comment section isn’t anymore what it was *10 years ago*. You can basically pick any article from that era for comparison…
Well, shoganai, eh? I guess those are the times we are living in now. 😦
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Abandoned Kansai 