Abandoned Kansai

A legendary, shockingly dilapidated factory office and an old man with a sickle – this exploration could have gone wrong in more than one way…

Tohoku isn’t exactly famous for its abandoned places. Mostly mines (*Taga*, *Matsuo*, and *Ozarisawa*) and of course the vast area for (mostly foreign…) Fukushima catastrophe tourists. Most popular among local explorers is probably the Ironworks Office Building, which you can see on the first photo of the gallery. It’s a pretty gorgeous wooden structure at the site of a mostly demolished smeltery dating back to 1881, when Japan’s industrial revolution caught up 150 years of development within a couple of decades. Access was surprisingly easy when I explored the place with my friends Dan, Kyoko and Heather in autumn last year during a partly touristy road trip, so we took our time to have a look outside first – with not much success as most of the buildings on the premises must have been demolished around the time business closed in 2001. Yes, 2001! It’s hard to believe that the company was active until rather recently, but apparently it’s true… I’m still baffled by that fact and you probably will be, too, after looking at the photos. The last remaining building of the main area was the former office building, which also included a room for drafters / technical drawers as well as a laboratory, though the back part of the building, including the hallway leading to the lab, have been collapsed a couple of years ago. (And the rest of the building probably won’t make it another decade either. The wooden staircase leading to the upper floor was so… wobbly that I didn’t dare to go upstairs as I was afraid that it would collapse under my weight and probably bring the whole building down. And wouldn’t that have been embarrassing? (In addition to being most likely deadly…)
Before that another strange story happened. The four of us just entered the Ironworks Office Building through a door or partly collapsed wall (it was hard to say what it was…), when one of the girls spotted an old man outside, appearing out of nowhere from where we just came from. He was dragging one of his feet, kind of like a zombie, and was wearing rather worn clothes, holding an old sickle in one of his hands. Combine that with the rundown wooden building and the somewhat rainy weather and you have a perfect horror movie scenario. With four people it was kinda hard to hide in that part of the building, and we didn’t want to go much further inside, worried that we might cause some noise with all that rusty metal, brittle wood and broken glass around, so we carefully and anxiously watched the sickle zombie slowly scuffing his body past the 130 year old dilapidated structure we were in. Luckily he didn’t see, hear or smell us, before he finally turned right, leaving the premises. That’s when we finally relaxed and explored the building, at least the lower floor, because… well, you already know about the staircase.
As you can see on the photos, the interior of the building was quite eclectic, with probably at least one item from each decade between the 50s and the 00s – interestingly enough the calendar near one of the desks in the private office was from 2007, six years after the ironworks closed. Why? Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe the office was still used to deal with the aftermath of closing, maybe it was used for other purposes, maybe somebody unrelated left it behind. The atmosphere in there was actually kind of spooky – rather dark offices, vines growing in, the worn interior, the kind of dangerous state of the building.
On the way out I took a few quick shots through the window of the laboratory, basically because none of us was eager to find a way inside across an ankle-breaking field of slippery debris. Sometimes you have to cut your losses and move on, because there is almost always another location to explore…

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