Abandoned Kansai

Wooden sculptures, old TVs and weird Japanese raccoon dog statues – if any abandoned hotel ever deserved the (obviously made-up) name “Tom Nook’s Hotel” it’s this one!

Tom Nook is without a doubt the most famous tanuki in the world. The shop owner and real estate mogul kind of stars in Nintendo’s amazing Animal Crossing game series, though some players consider the greedy turbo-capitalist, named tanukichi in the original Japanese version, a genuine antagonist. What Nintendo leaves out for good reasons: tanuki are also part of many of Japan’s stories and legends as the bake-danuki is a type of yokai (supernatural being), dating back to the nihon shoki (“The Chronicles of Japan”, finished in 720. They are usually described as upright walking and shape-changing (8 disguises!) with a foolish character. What makes them stand out visually to most people though are their massively oversized scrotums, most likely added to the character around 1200 AD when goldsmiths started to use tanuki pelts when hammering gold nuggets into leaves. The scrotums can be used to glide through the air, to trawl, and to use them as a drum. None of which Toom Nook would ever do, because he is not a bake-danuki! (Super Mario’s tanuki costumes from various games also missed the giant balls for obvious reasons – it’s impossible to jump and run if you need a wheelbarrow for your testicles to get around.)

The second I saw Tom Nook’s Hotel I knew two things: It was abandoned for sure and most likely not much fun to explore. One of those hotels you look at and know that it would be vandalized and damp. Fortunately the whole tanuki / bake-danuki thing came as a (positive) surprise, because the lobby confirmed all the concerns I had outside – it was mostly empty and pretty much vandalized. (In the rest of the article I only use the term tanuki for simplicity as the Japanese term in English commonly refers to the yokai version anyway; and if not you should realize from context.) A calendar behind a small bar from August 2010 implied that the hotel was closed almost 10 years ago and an omiyage sample box kind of confirmed that there must have been a little shop, probably in the lobby or nearby. Right after the lobby the guest rooms started… and the problems with the floors. Some were cluttered with furniture (maybe courtesy of some airsoft players?) others caved in when stepped on – and some were flat-out broken, so I had to step down half a meter on the dirt floor below to continue. So what do you do when you are exploring an underwhelming abandoned hotel like that? Right, you look for the shared baths, which tend to be the highlights of deserted accommodations in Japan. Unfortunately it was a rainy day, so everything was damp and dark, the kind of place you’ll expect to find a dead body at.
It didn’t get that bad, but fortunately the bizarre-o-meter exploded when I already had given up on the location. The rotenburo (outdoor bath) of the shared bath for men featured a strangely smiling tanuki statue. So far, so good. At least one somewhat interesting photo. Then I heard my friends laughing! “Florian, you have to see this! The tanuki in the rotenburo for women has a boner!” And indeed, there it was – as usual, the rotenburo for women was much smaller, but the tanuki’s penis was very happy to see guests! This was such a sexist dick move! (Pun intended…) Bad enough that the baths for women in Japanese hotels almost always are smaller / less elaborate, here they not only put tanuki statues in the rotenburo (which is not common at all!), but they chose the flaccid for the men’s bath and the erect one for the women’s bath. (To be honest, this is the first time I ever had to pay attention to the yokai dick as tanuki tend to have tiny penises, because the attention is on the balls, not the whole junk!)
Unfortunately the rest of the exploration turned back into the desperate hunt for at least somewhat interesting photos as nobody really wants to see rundown places – but in the end they can’t be all like the *Kanemochi Mansions*, so I took some of the quite nice view and of abandoned TVs; there’s something about those black mirrors…

In the end Tom Nook’s Hotel was a much better exploration than I expected thanks to the two tanuki statues and the three abandoned TVs, but overall it was average at best. When you hoped for a 9 in the morning, expect a 2 upon arrival and got a 5 when leaving it was just one of those days…

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