This internationally active, award winning Japanese glasses company featured several interesting offices and meeting rooms, two large floors of manufacturing / repairing space – and a goddamn cat!
Approaching this unremarkable and rather well maintained building in the industrial suburbs of a mid-sized Japanese town, it became pretty quickly apparent that this exploration could turn out much more difficult than anticipated. Except for a damaged gate and some unkept plants, there was only one sign that this building wasn’t in use anymore – and it was literally a sign, put up by a realtor… which meant that depending how old this sign was, the building technically wasn’t abandoned.
Due to several active companies in the neighborhood it was out of question to try the front door – unfortunately the potential back entrance / delivery bay was in sight from the road AND a next door trucking company, which was surprisingly busy at the time of my visit, considering that it was a Saturday. But you don’t drive for hours on a day off and then get scared off by technicalities like that, so my friend Shota and I rushed to the back and took cover in the shade of what probably was the outdoor part of the company’s ventilation system. It was a hot spring day (and unfortunately not a hot spring day – those are so much more relaxing, especially in winter!) and pretty much every living creature was looking for a cool spot. Something we didn’t consider when we climbed up the loading bay (no steps or ladders…) to get inside the building though what looked like a pried open and slightly overgrown backdoor. All of sudden one of the most bloodcurdling scream I’ve ever heard and some furry thing sprinting at thunder speed between Shota and I, almost giving me a heart attack! A goddamn cat was lying in the shadow unnoticed, feeling the urge to run away instead of staying cool by keeping cool. Friggin hell, I’m getting too old for this shit!
Fortunately the back door was indeed open, so after making sure that nobody was alert by the little ruckus, we slipped through an opening and got inside.
The abandoned Japanese Glasses Company turned out to be a large building with a lot of empty space. Award winning in the early 90s (including at least two Good Design Awards of the Japan Industrial Design Promotion Organization / Japan Institute of Design Promotion) and bankrupt 20 years later, financial disaster apparently didn’t strike by surprise – almost all rooms were empty, which was especially disappointing in the case of the large production / repair spaces. Even the offices and meeting rooms were mostly empty. A couple of display cases here, some boxes with a few documents there… and three safes by three different manufacturers: Crown, Naiki, and Waco. Navigating some of the rooms wasn’t exactly easy as we could have been easily spotted from the outside through some large – and the possibility that a real estate agent could have shown up at any moment wasn’t a nerve-calmer either. My favorite part of this location was the office of the company’s president – thick carpet flooring, two heavy desks (one for work, one for small meetings), wooden wall paneling; and a large world with Japan in the center. Ah, the 80s… when Japan reached for world dominance once more, only to be stopped last second again… and without nukes this time though.
From an objective point of view the abandoned Japanese Glasses Company was a slightly above average exploration at best. Too much empty space, not a very good risk/reward rate, quite a long drive to get there. Nevertheless I liked the location quite a bit. I had never seen pictures of the location before (or since…), so it felt like a real exploration. Abandoned glasses companies are probably quite rare and the left behind stuff in the upper offices was interesting indeed – especially that large map. I knew they existed and I’ve seen them before on pictures, nevertheless it was quite thought-provoking to actually stand in front of one in an abandoned office that was in use for several decades. It’s always a pleasure to question your own views, in my case Eurocentric ones.
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cool :). i can relate to that situation with cat, last year we were checking one local abandoned hut, the garden was pretty overgrown, when we were getting to the actuall building, some kind of roe deer jumped from tall grass that was all around us and ran away, right next to us…yeah i allmost shit myself at that moment lmao
I used to work for a optics company and this brought back all sorts of memories.
Good memories, I hope!