The average year in Japan starts with a first shrine visit called “hatsumode” – the not so average year, too. So let’s keep this Abandoned Kansai tradition and start the year with an abandoned shrine… a spooky one! Halloween meets hatsumode!
The Abandoned Dolls Shrine was one of the strangest sites I’ve ever laid eyes on. I’m sure it was always a bit surreal, but seeing dozens of dirty dolls in a building that could collapse any second is more than just a bit uncommon – especially since some of those toys had been tempered with. The most harmless variation was just sitting them on an old chair to be able to the better / more interesting (?) photos, while some other poses were just straight bizarre! Who undresses a female baby doll and ties it, hands over head, to a wall? Leaving them in the original wrapper wasn’t always a better solution though as some of them looked like they were suffocated by their own packaging. All of this happening in a double function house as the monk seemed to live in this place of worship – which had seen better days and was on the brink of collapse; I’ve seen massive steel gymnasiums that have been flattened by the weigh of snow, so whenever news will reach me that the Abandoned Dolls Shrine collapsed, I won’t be surprised! Unfortunately I don’t know anything about this creepy beauty, but it looked abandoned for decades. Two at least, maybe even three or four.
The Abandoned Dolls Shrine was not only one of the smallest and spookiest locations I’ve ever explored, it also turned out to be the last I write about before the 10th anniversary of Abandoned Kansai – on January 8th 2010 I decided to start a blog on WordPress to publish some texts and photos, because at the time only a handful of foreigners wrote occasionally about abandoned places in Japan… and they were all based in Tokyo / Kanto, while I was and still am living in Osaka / Kansai. 10 years later I’m still running Abandoned Kansai – and thanks to a backlog of several dozen locations plus a few new explorations every now and then, I guess I will continue to do so for a few more years…
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this one would really freak me out – I’m terrified by old dolls in the first place, so –
cool :). yeah that building deffinitelly looks like its ready to go down any minute now lol. the atmosphere is deffinitelly pretty creepy tho