Even without the Olympic Games and the crippling tourist masses Japan has turned into a hot mess as the number of new coronavirus infections is exploding and a humid summer is descending on the pretty much fireworks and festival free country after a comparatively mild rainy season. “You’re living on an island – grab a beer and enjoy the beach!” is easier said than done as the coast in central Kansai is pretty nasty. It mostly consists of artificial islands and tons of large industrial areas. To get to somewhat acceptable beaches it takes me between 60 and 90 minutes door to sand (Suma / Omimaiko), the nice beaches at the “Korean Sea of Japan” or Shirahama are more like three hours away – not really suitable as day trips, especially in the days of social distancing and the mixed messages by the Japanese government and private companies about subsidizing a domestic travel campaign while dropping subtle hints regarding avoiding unnecessarily crossing prefecture borders. Yes, it’s one hot humid mess with temperatures up to 34 °C (felt like 37!) and a piercing sun – if you ever wondered about the origins of Japanese mythology, just spend two weeks in August in Kyoto or Osaka and you’ll easily piece it together yourself.
Anyway, heat, humidity, everything’s nasty and I’m not really in the mood for endless hours of research for a well-written profound article, so let me pick up on the Kansai coastline theme and post a few pictures I took nine years ago of an abandoned train line that once went from Osaka’s city center to the harbor. It was, most likely, a freight line built in the late 1950s that split from the tracks of the current Osaka Loop Line near Bentencho Station and went for a total of about 1.5 kilometers to Fukuzaki and the artificial island that is part of it. Since my solo photo walk back in 2011 most of the tracks have been removed, the rest looks more or less overgrown now. As railroad tracks are not very wide the narrow strip of land that has been reclaimed was used for very specific purposes – the Osaka Horie Boys, a baseball club for elementary and middle school kids, use a stretch to stretch and play sports, but most of the ground has been turned into commercial parking lots.
The Osaka Harbor Railroad was nothing more than a nice walk on a sunny autumn afternoon a long time ago, but hopefully some of you enjoyed my little rant or are railroad nerds who appreciate memories of disappearing tracks… And if you appreciate the memories of disappearing trains, *check out my article about this train graveyard*.
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Abandoned Kansai 
Your posts are always so interesting. Love the faded colors of this fading place.
cool :D. while im not a very big train nerd, its kinda fun too, i know few places where you can see the remains of an old railroad too, its interesting. one of these places i knew had a tunnel and you could still see how the “roof” is black from the steam train times…now i kinda wonder if thats still there haha
That sounds really neat! What area of this big blue/green marble are you located on? There are some amazing tunnels that are a few thousand feet long up in Pennsylvania as well as surrounding states that have those. It’s a step back in time.
i am from europe, czech republic :D. deffinitelly stuff like this is a trip to the past. one of longest train tunels im personally know of is over kilometer long, build in late 1800s. i actually used to travel trough it every day twice when i was still going to school. few times they probably forgot to light the train interior lights up and we went trough it in complete darkness as the tunnel is not lit up…was an interesting experience hahaha
I too enjoyed the colors as well as the color pops that were beautiful and unexpected in an otherwise ‘abandoned’ piece of land. Thank you Florian 🙂