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Archive for November, 2018

Countryside Wedding Venue

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Haikyo, Japan, Photography, Travel, Urbex on 2018/11/27| 3 Comments »

I don’t know it for a fact, I just know it’s true: Japan has more churches than devout Christians – and while both probably feel abandoned, this original find actually was!

Whenever you see churches or other buildings with big stained glass windows in Japan, chances are that you are looking at a wedding venue (or a love hotel…). I think I mentioned it before: only about one percent of the people living in Japan identify as Christians, yet more than half of all wedding include a Christian ceremony, which means that there is a low demand of real churches, but a rather big need for church looking places – hence all those stained glass abominations, usually connected to / in the same building as a reception hall and even a hotel; Japan is all about convenience after all… and big white weddings the guests pay for.
One day I was on the way in the countryside, looking for another abandoned place, when I came across a roped off small chapel with a partly demolished parking lot. There was a museum and a rather busy road nearby, and it felt like the light was already fading , so there was neither time nor opportunity for an expansive exploration, but I was able to have a quick walk around the area and take a few handheld snapshots. It turned out that the chapel was part of a whole wedding venue consisting of various buildings and smaller structures for the reception as well as the typical photo shooting afterwards. Since this was a chance discovery I know absolutely nothing about the place and its history, not even the name.

Unfortunately I’ve been quite pressed for time recently, so this is just a short article about a small location, but at least it’s an original find and a step up from last week, when I didn’t have time at all to put something together. From the looks of it, the place hadn’t been abandoned for long, so maybe I’ll get the opportunity to come back in a few years, when it hopefully developed some kind of patina. And isn’t partly burnt down, like the *Ibaraki Wedding Palace*.

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Countryside Restaurant & Karaoke

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Haikyo, Japan, Photography, Restaurant, Travel, Urbex, Video, Visited in 2018 on 2018/11/13| 2 Comments »

Food in Japan is amazing – but the competition is boiling and not all eateries survive; some even become abandoned…

Having long term success in the Japanese restaurant business is tough, even for established brands from overseas. Burger Kings are hard to find, Wendy’s gave up. When one of the first Coldstone Creameries opened in West Japan’s largest shopping mall the lines were 2.5 hours long. Half a year later you could walk up to the counter most of the times, two years later the store was gone. I think the first Krispy Kreme a few years ago in Osaka had a similar destiny: Lines around the block, regular business, closed after a year or so. The standards are high and especially in densely populated areas food is available everywhere 24/7. Even the main roads through the countryside are littered with restaurants – most of them offering rather simple dishes like Japanese curry, soba, and udon… but still!
Of course not all of them can survive. While closed kombini are usually de-branded and blend in with the countless other abandoned dull buildings in the suburbs and countryside, independent restaurants tend to be just closed, sometimes boarded up.
The Countryside Restaurant & Karaoke was closed almost 20 years ago and boarded up tightly at first sight, so my expectations were pretty low, but it looked kinda cool from the outside, which justified a quick stop. It turned out that there was a way in after all – and that the place has visitors that loves to break glass. Windows, doors, glass cabinets, coolers. You name it. If it originally had a solid piece of glass, it was broken now. That probably contributed to a decent amount of air circulation, which means that the place was dusty, but not overly moldy – which is always a plus in my book, because so many abandoned places in Japan rot away, creating unbearable smells upon closer looks. Unfortunately there was also not much left behind after almost 20 years of abandonment, except for a few tables, the broken stuff and a mummified mouse… The back area with the karaoke rooms looked a bit spooky, but it was pretty much empty of course, too. Typical 60s building abandoned 30 years later.

Overall the Countryside Restaurant & Karaoke was a decent exploration, especially since this is not a popular location and I hadn’t seen any inside pictures before exploring it last weekend (yep, those photos are not even two and a half days old…) – a good place for a quick stop on the way to other locations (*Facebook* followers know more!), but not as good as the *Japanese Restaurant & Onsen* or the *Japanese Yakiniku Restaurant*.

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Love Hotel Orleans

Posted in Abandoned, Haikyo, Japan, Kanto, Love Hotel, Photography, Shiga, Travel, Urbex, Video on 2018/11/06| 3 Comments »

Converting love hotels into regular once in the wake of the tourism boom and ahead of the 2020 Olympics sounds like a reasonable idea, but is no guarantee for success – as proven by the Love Hotel Orleans.

Japan (as a whole) has a reputation for having unusual preferences when it comes to sex related things – pixilated porn involving tentacles, underage girls and rather “rapey” topics. While that stuff is comparatively underground as it isn’t shoved in your face like the Heian Shrine or the Tokyo Sky Tree, the love hotel industry is worth about 30something billion USD, twice as much as the anime and mange industry that is happily advertised everywhere and to everyone. Of course the current rather conservative government isn’t the biggest fan of those f#ck hotels, so in 2016 they began to encourage love hotels to convert into regular hotels… but not necessarily with much success. The love hotel industry is not exactly my expertise and I can’t quote studies and statistics, but from me living here for more than a dozen years I have the impression that the number of love hotels stayed about the same, just now some of them are listed on regular hotel booking sites. Not a lot of them, because close to nobody in that industry speaks English or Chinese – and who wants to deal with customers you can’t communicate with unless it’s a quick sell? So Abe, if you think a noteworthy amount of love hotels will turn into regular ones… think again!
Especially since the past showed that similar conversations are not a guarantee for success. First of all, there are plenty of bankrupt regular hotels, hundreds… thousands of them abandoned. And second, there are former love hotels that failed miserably as regular ones. Like the Love Hotel Orleans in Shiga. At least I thought that it was a converted love hotel… There is close to nothing about it on the internet, but the information on location implied that the accommodation started as a love hotel and ended as a regular one (not before 2010) – fading outdoor signs with the rather convoluted love hotel rates, indoor signs calling the place Business Hotel Orleans. The rooms also had both a love hotel vibe (colorful stained glass windows in most rooms, unusual bath tubs / bathrooms) and a regular hotel vibe (not a single kinky room…) – but overall it was surprisingly boring, despite the rather low amount of vandalism. But there was nothing memorable about the Love Hotel Orleans. No pool, no bar, no kinky rooms, no special item. Just one slightly vandalized room to the next. Basically the *Yakuza Love Hotel* without an exciting story…

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