Abandoned Kansai

2018 has been a strange year in many ways – and I’m still not sure what to make of it. A look back.

Let’s start this article on a positive note: A very big THANKS to all of you who support Abandoned Kansai by liking and sharing pictures and articles on social media, with friends via e-mail, via postings in forums! While the amount of comments on the blog directly is still dwindling, the social media accounts (*Facebook* and *Twitter*) are doing more than well (probably because I post quite a bit of time-exclusive material) – and it’s always nice to find some new links in the referrer list of the statistics. Abandoned Kansai is basically a one man, ad free side-project and I really appreciate all the support and most of the resulting conversations! (Please be aware that it might take me some time to reply to messages – and that I sometimes get distracted and don’t answer at all, which usually doesn’t happen on purpose.)
In the Chinese zodiac scheme 2018 was the year of the dog, though sometimes it felt like one year long dog day… which is very subjective, of course, and probably includes overthinking too many first world problems, especially after the grandiose 2017, which took me from one end of Japan to the other and allowed me to explore a record number of locations (70, checked out a total of 120!) with a record number of people (20) on a record number of days (45 – and those were just the exploration days, not including the time spent to create this blog or finding locations…). In 2018 those numbers dropped to 48 explored places (+ 2 roadside attractions) and 67 checked out places with 12 different people on 24 days – so with this article and maybe an “all locations of 2018 not worth their own blog entry” piece I barely get to the 52 posts I need per year to keep this blog running on a weekly basis. I know, I know, a ton of other explorers would be happy to get that many locations under their belts, especially since the explored places included some world class locations and more than a dozen originals finds (marked with OF in the gallery below, though I had to leave some out for obvious reasons), but cutting back involuntarily hardly ever feels good – and 2018 definitely was the year of empty phrases and insincere apologies in pretty much every aspect of my life. One more “I’m so sorry, but…” and I’ll go Duke Nukem on somebody’s head! Being stuck between fake American friendliness and even faker Japanese friendliness I sometimes miss some good old German “Look, the situation is like that…” straight talk, though the insane amount of dishonesty and unreliability in 2018 was mainly a non-urbex problem – and the explorations that actually happened in the end were almost all memorable.

My favorite thing to do, probably overall, is going on road trips in Japan. Spending four or more days in an area of Zipangu I don’t know very well yet is the greatest thing ever. Especially when combined with nice people, spectacular abandoned places, interesting touristy stuff, local food… and good weather (i.e. no rain – everything else is good weather!). Unfortunately the amount of road trips went down from 3 to 1, plus one solo trip per year – in 2017 I was able to visit all nine regions of Japan, in 2018 I never got off Honshu, except for when I left Japan to visit family and friends. (No urbex in Europe last year, half a dozen places the year before, including the still popular *Chateau Banana*…)
But enough of the whining, though the hot and humid summer with three typhoons, a heat wave and an earthquake, all costing precious lives, would deserve its own paragraph.
I guess overall it was still a good urbex year – I just wish there would have been more opportunities… So if you are living in areas like Kyushu, Tohoku or Hokkaido and want to give this urbex thing a try with one of the most experienced explorers in Japan, feel free to drop me a line. Most plans fall through for one reason or another, but hey, I also met some truly good people via urbex, so why not trying it this way? (After 9 years I have most of Kansai picked clean and I barely ever do revisits. So pretty much all day trips begin with at least two hours on trains / in cars. Another reason to love multiple day trips – we barely ever spend the night further than 30 minutes away from the first location of the day.)
On the positive side, I was able to spend some amazing days with fantastic people… exploring some spectacular old clinics and barely touched love hotels, checking out more than a dozen original finds (some of them successfully, though you won’t see all of them until later this year… or next year… or the one after that!), barely fleeing the scenes several times when triggering alarms or having nosy geezers checking out our parked cars, almost got snowed in at an abandoned golf hotel – I bought the most delicious apples I ever ate from a street vendor on a countryside road in Miyagi prefecture (they also have the best maguro don up there!), froze my butt off at the Tottori Snow Dunes, had pink ginger curry at an obscure museum that was basically about itself, forged a knife from a metal rod with little more than a hand-operated coal forge, an anvil and a hammer, climbed the 1000 steps up Yamadera, enjoyed Japanese beef in at least five prefectures, did the Geibikei river cruise, and presented some of my *North Korea photos* in a solo exhibition at a gallery in Osaka.
Having all of this written down, I guess 2018 wasn’t a bad year overall – it was just a bit disappointing considering what it could have been; and going from 45 to just 24 active days, that drop was just too much. Let’s see what 2019 will bring. Hopefully more explorations on more days with old friends and new ones. And of course more original finds, because the well-known stuff is for tourists… 🙂

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