Abandoned Kansai

A mystery building with countless and no purposes, but quite an unusual design – the Tang Dynasty Envoy Mansion raised more questions than it answered…

Most deserted places are abandoned for the same reasons: Usually they either ran into financial problems… or the owner died and nobody wanted to take over. It’s an unspectacular, but very, very common explanation. But it most likely doesn’t apply to the Tang Dynasty Envoy Mansion – a name so eclectic as the items left behind.
If you don’t know where it is exactly, you can easily miss the Tang Dynasty Envoy Mansion. Located at a remote road, after kilometers of seeing no other buildings, one just doesn’t expect one – especially since this one is separated from the road by a large parking lot, both the entrance to the lot and the building itself partly overgrown. I passed by with my dear friend Hamish and almost missed it… and then we considered skipping it, because it was heavily raining and we didn’t know anything about the location anyway. But to us abandoned buildings are like mountains to climbers – we just have to go because they are there… In the five minutes that followed we didn’t gain an iota of real knowledge, but we became significantly more wet on this damp and overall quite uncomfortable November day. It turned out that the building was C shaped and one of those brutalist constructions – raw concrete, which was still in pretty good condition. Doing research for this article I found some old satellite pictures from the 1970s, where neither the mansion nor the road were visible, so I guess both must have been built in the early 80s or maybe even later, probably another one of those bubble economy projects. “Hey, we have money or can borrow it cheaply! Let’s build a museum / library / whatever in the middle of nowhere!” And so they did. Two floors in one part of the building (consisting of a library with a restaurant on top of it) and a one storey part with a wavy ceiling that was labelled memorial hall… of some monk. Probably a state run institution to honor / study the Tang dynasty envoys to China about 1200 years ago – unfortunately my research about that ended with no results, so I assume that the building wasn’t used with its original purpose for very long and probably ended before the age of the internet. Which is kind of supported by the fact that it was lastly used as a storage for all kinds of things, including banners to advertise a local festival in 2005… and it’s more than likely that this was the last year of the repurposed use, not the first one. Sadly the part of the building with two floors was still tightly locked and inaccessible, but the other part offered a strange “collection” of all kinds of items. Glass showcases, lacquer boxes, banners, an old TV, library cards, a tape recorder, a porn magazine (don’t worry, they are censored in Japan anyway… and I added four black squares for all you faint of heart Americans who love to watch the most disgusting mutilations at prime time, but freak out over a nipple…), and many, many, many more random items – so signs of any library or institute allowing historical or social studies.

Even after all this time I still don’t know what to make of the Tang Dynasty Envoy Mansion. It was probably build in the mid to late 1980s and did whatever it was supposed to do for about 10 to 15 years before being used by the local authorities as a storage and finally shut down completely. Surely not an abandoned place one would travel far for, but it was definitely interesting to have a closer look, even though in the end we left puzzled and hoped that the next location would be more mainstream urbex… like the *Hachijo Royal Hotel*.

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