Abandoned Kansai

June is probably the worst month to spend in Japan. While the temperatures are still at a bearable level (25 to 30 degrees Celsius / about 75 to 85 degrees Fahrenheit) the humidity goes crazy thanks to the rainy season. Six weeks of rain, probably on five days a week. Not fun when you like to spend your time outdoors.
Four weeks into the 2012 rainy season the weather forecast announced a whole weekend without rain and I got excited. Finally some urbex again, even an overnight trip for two days. Of course on Friday the forecast changed from two days of sun to sunny on Saturday and rainy on Sunday, but one day of exploration is better than none, so decided to finally visit the “Red Factory”, a favorite of Japanese blogs in the first half of 2012. It was in day trip range, but nevertheless a pain in the ass to get to due to its remote location. The closest train station was about 11 kilometers away, with buses running twice a day on weekends, at 12.30 p.m. and 5 p.m., going back to the station at 7.30 a.m. and 1.30 p.m. – which meant a pretty long walk on the way back…

At least I was able to sleep in on Saturday, only to find the weather wasn’t sunny at all. Not even cloudy. It was overcast, pretty much the worst weather for photography. June in Japan…

3 hours later (2 hours on several trains, then half an hour waiting for another 30 minutes on a bus) I finally reached the Red Factory on this hot and humid, but not sunny, Saturday – and I was a bit disappointed, to say the least. The place was not nearly as big and not nearly as red as I imagined it to be (I picked the “most red” photos for this article…). And the road there was impassable for cars due to a retractable road block I hadn’t seen on any photo before. The first factory building, empty on old Japanese blog entries, usually not to be seen on newer ones (a fact I didn’t realize during my research, of course) was filled with all kinds of canisters, tools and cars with white and yellow license plates – which means privately, not commercially, used vehicles. It looked like somebody started to use the factory as storage buildings. Great… infiltration, not exploration.
Cautiously I continued to walk up the mountain. Next building – a brand-new midget tractor. All the other buildings were pretty much broom-clean. Not exactly what I expected. And what about the partly overgrown house on the other side of the small river running through the factory area? Hastily I quickened my pace to reach the top of the factory area, not sure anymore if it was still abandoned. 50 meters of elevation gain later I reached the end of the factory area. Nobody there, so at least I was sure no human surprises were waiting for me in the back. An animal surprise was there though. A dead animal. Well, more than dead – the skeleton of a deer, most likely a Sika Deer or Japanese Deer, cervus nippon nippon. At least a dozen Japanese urban explorers went to the Red Factory that year and none did care to mention that the place was in use and that parts of a deer skeleton were lying in front of one of the buildings. What the heck…?!

From that point on the exploration was pretty much easy going. Of course I was still worried that somebody would show up, but I was way too busy to avoid spiders, snakes and other animals in the buzzing summer season.

Sadly there is not much I can tell you about the history of the Red Factory. In Japanese it is usually called the Red Ochre Factory, so given the looks of the factory it’s safe to say that the facility was used to produce red ochre from yellow ochre. Captain Obvious strikes again!

Aaaand… that’s pretty much it. Unspectacular exploration, getting there and back took much longer and was much more of an effort than actually exploring the Red Factory. A bit disappointing since I had great expectations, but after sitting at home for several weeks due to the weather it was a welcome change… (The walk back though wasn’t fun at all. Jeans, hiking boots, full camera equipment on an extremely humid day along a river – 11 kilometers in under two hours or I would have missed the train, running every 60 to 90 minutes.)

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I planned to publish a video with this article, but Youtube seems to be a bit bitchy again on this computer – I will upload it most likely on August 26th.