Abandoned Kansai

Small factory, but not small business – concrete is big in Japan!

Cement… concrete… Same difference, right? Well, not really. Cement is actually an ingredient of concrete – along with sand and gravel. That’s why cement factories tend to be much bigger and more rare than concrete factories. Just like most flour factories are much bigger than most bakeries… You can actually find concrete factories everywhere in Japan, because there are so many of them – barely ever abandoned though, because business is good. Despite being only 1/25 the size of the United States, Japan uses as much concrete per year! For buildings, bridges, and roads, of course, but especially for dams and Tetrapods – about half of Japan’s 35000 kilometers long coastline has been smothered with some kind of concrete. Business is good, especially since there seems to be a strong connection between politics and the cement / concrete industry – Asō Tarō, for example, the former Prime Minister of Japan, not only was previously the president of Aso Cement; his family owns the company… Since 2012 he’s the Minister of Finance under Abe – and partly responsible for the insane concrete fortification of the Tohoku coastal line in the aftermath of the 2011 tsunami…)
A couple of years ago I found and explored this abandoned concrete factory right next to a big road, which made maneuvering around not exactly easy, but I guess after a while I just ignored the heavy traffic. It was a rather open area with half a dozen ways in and out, so in case of somebody approaching me there would have been alternatives to talking it over. Fortunately that wasn’t necessary, despite me taking my time for something like two hours.

Exploring the Small Concrete Factory was a decent experience at the time, given that industrial ruins are much more uncommon in Japan than in the rest of the world – unfortunately it was just a tiny facility in comparison to the *Sumitomo Osaka Cement Factory* or some of the places I explored in *Hokkaido*.

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