The first location of the Nagano day trip I mentioned before was in a somewhat well-known and still active skiing town. Unfortunately nobody told me ahead of time, because otherwise I probably would have questioned the idea of going to a ski resort for urban exploration in early April for obvious reasons. In case it’s not obvious enough: snow. It wasn’t obvious enough for my co-explorers and so I stared into 5 Pikachu faces. Obviously nobody considered this: Just because we already had +20°C in Osaka doesn’t mean that there couldn’t be two meters of snow in other places of Japan (or three or four…). Like a skiing town in the Japanese Alps. It only shows that common sense is far from common. And while accommodations still in business are easily accessible even in winter, guess what – abandoned lodges are not, because nobody removes the snow. Second round of Pikachu faces…
I tried to be a good sport about it, but the thing is: I’m on the taller and wider end as far as humans go. On the one hand, it makes me a rather careful explorer, which is a good thing in my book. Hardly any urbex injuries, because I rather don’t climb a rusty or brittle staircase – sometimes to the frustration… or amusement… of my co-explorers. The latter in this case. I still think it’s stupid to cross an untouched snow-covered surface when you have no idea how solid it is and what’s underneath it. But I guess it’s much easier to cross when you weigh less than my dinner. So I hurled my grumpy fat ass up that wall of snow and towards the abandoned hotel my dear friends picked out first (I actually didn’t know half of the people, and I think my main purpose that day was seat warmer and gas money / highway fee sharer…). Years prior I explored the *Matsuo Mine Apartment Buildings* with another group of friends, and when going from one building to another one of my legs sank into the snow balls deep. Not a pleasant memory – and with that in mind I approached that rundown looking hotel. Screw my life, I could have stayed at home and watch anime with a Strong Zero. All. Weekend. Long! On the other hand: I never did that, so why start now? So I kept walking toward the dilapidated hotel on unstable ground, much to the entertainment of half a dozen half-heights, sinking into various depths with every stop, sometimes involuntarily voicing my concerns about what’s happening with sounds, if you know what I mean. Ha, ha, ha, the fat foreigner is scared doing something extremely stupid…
Well, I made it across and into the building, which was… okay-ish, I guess? One of those fake timber constructions non-Alps people build when they create their fake version of the real deal. But with a shared gender-separated bath. All bitterness of the moment aside, as far as abandoned hotels go, this was actually one of the better ones. The looks were unusual by Japanese standards, the rooms all had two floors, the melting snow looked nice once you were inside and the floors indoors were actually solid, despite being abandoned for 20 year. (The Tudor style hotel was opened around 1980, was renamed in the late 90s and closed after about 20 years in business – rather short, even by Japanese standards.)
Was it worth the long trip and the effort to get inside? Probably not, this one was a tough one overall. But hey, I don’t do many snow explorations and February is perfect for a set like that, so I hope you’ll enjoy it and maybe have a look at the *Canadian World Park* afterwards – a snowed in themed park modeled after Anne of Green Gables by Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery.
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Abandoned Kansai 