Abandoned Kansai

The Saikaibashi Corazon Hotel Monorail is one of those surprise locations you stumble upon every once in a while. *A year ago during Golden Week* I was on my way to the *Saikaibashi Public Aquarium* and went down some steps minding my own business when all of a sudden I saw something overgrown through the bushes. At first I thought it was the entrance of the aquarium, but getting closer it was pretty clear that this was some abandoned transportation device. A red cabin with very dirty greenish windows. So my second idea (which lasted for the rest of the trip) was that this monorail granted access to the aquarium and therefore was somehow connected to it.

Well, I was wrong, in more than one way. First of all the Saikaibashi Corazon Hotel Monorail technically isn’t really a monorail, at least not in the modern way – it’s more like a slope car (スロープカー/ surōpukā), kind of a sub-category of modern monorails. At least the Japanese term is a brand name of Kaho Manufacturing, so it might not be the proper word to use either, but I guess we’ll go with it from now on.

Since I didn’t know what a slope car was I better give an explanation in case you don’t either. A slope car is a small automated monorail that provides accessibility for handicapped or elderly people, usually transporting them between entrance gates / parking lots / buildings by avoiding stairs at steep slopes. In 1966 Yoneyama Industry invented a fright-only monorail system to be used in mikan orchards (mikan are very delicious seedless and easy-peeling tangerines). A system to transport construction workers and lumberjacks was developed later, but it wasn’t until the 1990s when the system became popular for the general public when Kaho Manufacturing entered the market with great success in Japan and Korea, installing 80 slope cars of their Slope Car brand alone.

I don’t know when the Saikaibashi Corazon Hotel Monorail opened or closed, but I guess it was after 1990. In 1996 it was still operating as I found a report in Japanese written by a guest of the hotel. He was using the slope car at the Corazon Hotel not to reach the Saikaibashi Aquarium, which was already abandoned at the time, but to get to the waterfront below the hotel. From there guests of the Corazon Hotel were able to board a boat once or twice a day to get to the nearby and then quite popular Huis Ten Bosch amusement park, a Netherlands themed park; Nagasaki and the Netherland have a close common history of more than 400 years, sadly the theme park never lived up to that history and is in danger of becoming an abandoned place for about 10 years now – half its existence. I guess at one point in time after 1996 the boat connected to Huis Ten Bosch was cancelled and with that there was no use for the slope car (capacity: 12 people) since the aquarium was already close a long time ago…

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