Abandoned Kansai

Another hotel high on a mountain overlooking the Seto Inland Sea… and guess what – it was abandoned! 🙂

Spring is one of the most beautiful times of the year to travel in Japan, especially after the cherry blossom season is over and the roads and rails are back to “terribly crowded” instead of “completely congested”. It’s also the perfect season for some urbex, because wildlife is still starting to get into gear – spiders and snakes are still small, overgrown buildings are still accessible and not in the death grip of vines.
It was on a spring weekend trip a few years ago that I explored the Seto Sea Hotel a little bit outside of a rather touristy town. Too far to walk from the closest station I took a bus to spare myself a two hour walk and just hiked the last two kilometers or so up a mountain. Considering my efforts to get to the hotel I wasn’t surprised to see two mid-sized buses parked in front of the building; license plates still on, but slightly vandalized. The back entrance and with it an alternative escape route was quickly found, so I made my way to the main entrance and… entered.
The Seto Sea Hotel turned out to be one of those boring hotel ruins I tend to complain about every once in a while – the views were spectacular, even on this overcast, humid day, but the rest of the place was just meh. Slightly vandalized, slightly moldy, slightly dirty, slightly boring. My favorite item left behind was a snack vending machine that offered takoyaki, fried onigiri, French fries, hotdogs, yakisoba and okonomiyaki – those machines are quite hard to find in general, and I’ve never seen one at a hotel, abandoned or hot.

Exploring the Seto Sea Hotel was such an average experience that I almost forgot about – it’s been close to six years since I went there and I only rediscovered it yesterday when I was looking for an abandoned hotel to write about. The last couple of days and weeks have been quite busy here, so I needed a location with not so many photos (as I didn’t have time to go through hundreds of them) and a generally unknown background story – because I didn’t have time to research dozens of sources. And in those regards the Seto Sea Hotel fully delivered – there wasn’t that much to see, and the only thing I know about it is that it closed in 2003. It was just another abandoned hotel in Japan, one of hundreds, nothing like the *Wakayama Ryokan* or the *Hachijo Royal Hotel*!

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