Abandoned Kansai

The *Mount Maya Tourist Hotel* is one of the most famous and most popular abandoned places in all of Japan – and it features one of the most gorgeous exteriors ever. What most visitors are not aware of is the little known fact that the hotel wasn’t the only accommodation on that seaside slope with the gorgeous view. On the other side of the cable car tracks was a small bungalow village! Unlike the massive art deco hotel, the little huts were not able to withstand the ravages of time – but if you look closely, you will find some interesting remains and a network of paths, now mostly covered by half a century of foliage…

While the history of Mount Maya and the tourist hotel is documented quite well (*click here* if you missed it the first time), there is little known about the bungalow village. I’ve seen it on a handful of maps / leaflets from the 1960s – one of them featuring a small print ad for a Isuzu Florian, a 4 door sedan introduced in the late 60s. I kid you not! Is life friggin weird sometimes or what? (Until yesterday, when I did some research about the bungalow village specifically, I didn’t even know that there was a Isuzu Florian! There even is an English Wikipedia entry…) According to a Japanese source, the bungalow village was built in 1957, at a time when the Maya Hotel was closed due to damages from World War II – and according to a leaflet about the Maya area, the 14 bungalows cost between 600 and 2500 Yen per night, housed between 2 and 12 people, and were available between July 1st and August 31st. That’s it for historical facts. Nothing about when it closed, nothing about the one remaining house you’ll see on the photos… Nevertheless this is infinitely more information in English than was available before this article.
The Mount Maya Bungalow Village I visited in early 2012 with a nice young fella from Nigeria living in New York, Bukola. We took the cable car half way up the mountain and descended a bit along a hiking trail to reach the bungalow village behind a partly collapsed house along a rather steep slope. It was early January and rather cold. Cold enough to snow every once in a while – not heavily, not strong enough to stay on the ground… but every flake is sacred along Osaka Bay, where half of the people dress like Reinhold Messner during his Himalayan adventures as soon as temperatures hit 10°C (50°F). Sadly there wasn’t that much to see. I am quite familiar with the history of Mount Maya and the layout of its elements, so I loved the flattened, leaves covered huts, the concrete foundations and the occasional leftover item – especially the large Bireley’s cooler! (Bireley’s is a soft drink brand and belongs to the Asahi Beer Company via Asahi Soft Drinks.) 50 years ago this part of Mount Maya must have looked quite different – I assume one had a gorgeous view at Kobe and the coastline, but in half a century trees grew so big and thick that there was little to see even in the midst of winter.
The one remaining house was definitely not a bungalow, it rather looked like a rich / important man’s home. Sadly it was also a dilapidated, vandalized death trap, probably thanks to the hiking trail leading right past by. From the back we were able to enter both floors separately, but of course there was also an internal wooden staircase in less than trustworthy condition. At the time of its construction, the house must have offered some of the best views in all of Kobe, at the time of my visit most of the living room had already crashed down to what I assume was a study / library. With a little bit of imagination you could still see the former glory – and that another major earthquake might send the whole construction down the slope, so we spent as little time inside as necessary to take a few quick shots.

If the Mount Maya Bungalow Village would have been on the slope of any other mountain, it would have been 90% less interesting to explore – but the location made it part of the fascinating and somewhat tragic Maya history. Of course afterwards we continued to have another look at the *Maya hotel*, but that… you probably already guess it… is a story for another time…

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