A lot of abandoned places leave an impression because of what they have been, not what they are now. The Hiroshima Hospital is one of those places…
Japanese urban explorers are quick labeling as haikyo, ruins, their common term for abandoned places – but very often they are just closed, or even worse: they just look abandoned and are actually still in use; especially “abandoned” schools. So whenever I see an “abandoned” place popping up on a Japanese site and it doesn’t feature inside photos, I become worried / skeptical. Was the location really abandoned or did the explorer not bother to have a closer look? Did they have a closer, but couldn’t get inside? Did they try to, but cause an alarm? Were they maybe even caught? (It happens to the best of us…) Did they get inside, but decided against publishing photos, because the interior was too spectacular or not interesting enough? There are a million different possibilities, and they all run through my head whenever I see outdoor shots only of a potentially abandoned place.
The Hiroshima Hospital was one of those places – all I knew about it was its location in a residential suburb of Hiroshima City, all I’ve seen about of it were a couple of outdoor shots, showing massive barricades. It’s quite a drive from Osaka to Hiroshima (between four and five hours, depending on the route and the traffic circumstances), so Dan, Kyoko & I made the hospital the first location of the second day, exploring along the way the day before.
At first all the things I worried about came true: The main entrance of the hospital was barricaded, people were walking their dogs, and even from the outside the places looked kinda vandalized. But coming a long way kinda makes you persistent, so we kept looking for a way in and found a weak spot after a while. Sadly our second impression of the Hiroshima Hospital wasn’t much better than the first one. Except for a couple if items here and there the clinic had been cleaned out when it was closed – as it should be. I still can’t believe the kind of equipment, tools and drugs I found in various other abandoned hospitals over the years, so it’s hard to complain that somebody did the right thing for a change. Unfortunately that person didn’t think things fully through. As confirmed by StreetView, the Hiroshima Hospital wasn’t boarded up at first, which explains the serious amount of vandalism – broken windows, graffiti, airsoft pellets… the whole shebang.
Long story short: I’ve been to three, four, five abandoned hospitals in Hiroshima prefecture, but the Hiroshima Hospital is actually my least favorite one. It didn’t taint a great exploration weekend at all, but to be honest: I was kinda hoping for another *Wakayama Hospital*, and by that standard it was definitely a disappointment.
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Abandoned Kansai 
so eerie
Luckily it was a very sunny day, so it didn’t feel that eerie. I’m sure on a rainy day it would have been much more spooky!
i usally like the stuff that you dont like, as it still tends to be way above our standards, but this time i gotta agree, this is kinda meh…atleast the view from that window (i assume) you took the exterior picture is kinda nice haha
Yeah, the surroundings were nice… the location itself not so much. But I’m trying to get some of the less attractive places out of the way – there are much better hospitals waiting to be written about… something like half a dozen of them! 🙂
yeah, keep on doing that, i often like the less attractive ones pretty often, it might be slighty boring if everything would be a top tier, as they say, not everything in life is perfect 😀
I get where you are coming from. The thing about rather clean places is that they tend to be rather unknown places – and I admit it, I like to be among the first to explore a place. When 100 people have been there and moved around everything, broke half of it, a place is much less interesting to be. Good thing is: I enjoy exploring the new places, you enjoy seeing the rundown places – we both win. 🙂
The machines u found in the photos 6-8 are old models of x-ray machines. How do I know it? We still use those models here in the Philippines in some old clinics and public government hospitals and they are brought here by the Japanese themselves on WW2.