Hello and welcome to Abandoned Kansai!
My name is Florian and I’m a German expatriate living and working in the Osaka area.
This is my first blog and I am not a native English speaker, so please don’t be too harsh with comments – I’m still learning. That also applies for the pictures I’ll put onto this blog: Until October 2009 I only used compact cameras with their standard settings. That’s when I found CJW’s great blog about hiking and climbing in Japan and I decided that I wanted to take better pictures myself. At that time I was hiking in the Kansai area for about a year and the more beautiful places I saw the stronger my urge to take good pictures grew – CJW’s pictures are amazing and I hope one day mine will be nearly as good.
Coincidentally around the same time I was talking to a friend back home about abandoned places. I was always fascinated by them, especially since I attended a seminar at the Zeche Zollverein in Essen, Germany, but I never took any actions exploring them as I was a couch potatoe at that time. Anyways, we talked about the topic and it inspired me to research abandoned places in Japan, although I failed miserably when I first came here three years ago. Since then Michael John Grist started his homepage, which is mainly about the Kanto area and also includes some interesting pictures. I continued my research (dozens of hours so far actually, with an incredible amount of dead ends – urban explorers tend to be quite secretive…), found an abandoned place that combined hiking and *haikyo* (the Japanese term for ruin, used by local urban explorers) and got hooked ever since.
Now that I have about a dozen abandoned places under my belt I decided to start this blog – inspired by the two blogs I’ve mentioned before; and by the fact that there is no (English) blog about urbex in Kansai. I’ll try to present as many abandoned places in Kansai as possible, but sadly the number of locations around here is very limited – so (hopefully…) I will go on short trips to cover other parts of Japan now and then, too.
Long story short: Please enjoy – and come back once in a while…
Abandoned Kansai 
Hallo Florian,
ich bin auf deinen Blog gestossen und finde das Thema höchst interessant. Ich muß mir auch mal so einen Ort ansehen, wenn ich das nächste Mal in Kansai bin. Nachdem ich mit einer unserer ehemaligen Mitstudentinnen vor kurzem ein verlassenes Hotel entdeckt habe, will ich mehr hier in der Region sehen. Hast du einen Tip für einen Ruhrgebiets/NRW Blog oder Infoseite über verlassenen Strukturen??
Viele Grüße nach Japan
Sascha
Hi Sascha,
ich habe das Thema erst vor wenigen Wochen für mich entdeckt und war seither nicht mehr in Deutschland – deshalb habe ich mich bei meinen Recherchen in erster Linie auf Japan konzentriert. Wenn ich was finde, lasse ich dich das aber gerne wissen, auch wenn ich fürchte, dass die urban explorers in Deutschland noch geheimniskrämerischer als in Japan sind. Wenn du mal wieder in die Gegend (= Asien) kommst, dann sag einfach Bescheid – inzwischen habe ich gute Informationen zu haikyos in ganz Japan und vereinzelt darüber hinaus.
Viele Grüße,
Florian
Hey Florian, thanks for the link and I`m glad my blog helped you get going on haikyo. As you say there`s little english-language coverage of ruins in the Kansai area, so I`ll definitely check in from time to time to see what you come up with. Hopefully I`ll make a haikyo trip to Kansai myself some time this year.
Thanks for stopping by! I’ll update the blog once or twice a week as long as I have material from previous trips – and then whenever I went to a new place. Let me know when you come to Kansai and I’ll show you around or at least point you to the locations worth going to.
Thanks so much for this!
I’m heading over the Japan in early April, so I’ve been digging around seeing what I can find, and this has pointed me in the right direction.
Thanks again!
It’s my pleasure – there will be lots of updates until April, so come back once in a while and see what I put up. Have a great time in Japan!
Thanks for linking to me 🙂 Good to see you getting into the spirit of haikyo yourself. There’s a heck of a lot of information out there in Japanese, but even then it’s very secretive and hard to find good leads. I think it helps keep a lot of these places from being completely exposed and vandalised though, so I tend to agree with keeping their locations and such secret 🙂
You seem to have some good photography skills and respect for the places though. If I come to Kansai at some point, I’ll give you a shout or something!
Hi Mike,
no problem – I really like your blog! The rotting onsen resort hotel was a great find, I really envy you about it…
Finding places (most likely with the help of the internet) is almost more fun to me by now than exploring them – and everybody should do it themselves, it’s part of the experience. I remember finding an abandoned driving school once after researching for like four or five hours. I went there the next day immediately only to find the place severely vandalized, although I found it on the net only once and with hardly any hints about the location; so this was one of the cases where the hunt was way more exciting than the exploration. (I’ll post it in a few weeks as I want to write about other places first.)
The amount of damage that can be done by giving away maps and way descriptions was shown by “Nippon No Haikyo”: I went to a few of the haikyo in there and more than 50% were demolished after the book was published. Vandalized haikyo are a sad sight, but demolished ones… It almost causes physical pain to see a bunch of rubble when expecting a whole and once beautiful building.
Yeah, let me know when you come to Kansai – I’ll show you my favorites or at least point you in the right direction.
Yea, completely agreed with you there. In my latest explore, I spent the whole night right through to the early hours of the morning researching the place. It was so sweet when we finally arrived and all the hard work paid off! It really does suck about the vandalism and a lot of the haikyo in that book have no doubt disappeared because of the exposure. Definitely wise to keep location and name information secretive.