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Archive for December, 2020

Japanese Castle Love Hotel

Posted in Abandoned, Haikyo, Hotel / Ryokan, Japan, Photography, Sex, Travel, Urbex, Video on 2020/12/22| 8 Comments »

Another year, another holiday season, another beautiful abandoned love hotel – this time probably my favorite one, the Japanese Castle Love Hotel. Merry XXX-mas!

2020 has been a spectacularly bad year for many of us… and the urbex scene was no exception. The dangers of the ever changing coronavirus situation kept a lot of people from exploring, while demolition crews did a surprisingly good job clinging to their jobs, resulting in the disappearance of quite a few famous locations. The Japanese Castle Love Hotel (JCLH) fortunately didn’t end up as a pile of rubble, but I wasn’t able to explore any abandoned love hotel for the first time in years, so for the 2020 edition of the Merry XXX-mas tradition I chose my favorite abandoned love hotel of all time, explored in 2018.
As I mentioned before, love hotels can often be found in clusters either in the center of big cities (Umeda / Namba in Osaka, for example) for easy access on foot or in the outskirts / between smaller cities for easy access by car. The Japanese Castle Love Hotel (guess why I named it that way…) was part of the latter category and more of a motel than a hotel. The surrounding love hotels, about half a dozen of them, had been abandoned years prior – one or two of them will make it to Abandoned Kansai sooner or later, the rest was already so rundown, moldy and vandalized that I didn’t even bothered taking photos. When I first went to that area years ago the JCLH was actually still active, so when I passed through again because of another location in 2018 I was surprised to see it abandoned. Well, pleasantly surprised, because it turned out to be accessible for most part, yet basically unvandalized at the same time, which is a really rare combination. There were animal droppings here and there, but no graffiti or signs of destruction. Quite the opposite, one or two rooms were actually bigger and nicer than my own friggin’ apartment!

Visible from afar and eye-catching thanks to its spectacular castle design, the JCLH, an original find at the time, was an exciting and at times spectacular exploration. Most rooms were in pristine condition and all of them had a quite Japanese design – tatami floors, beautiful wood carvings, traditional art elements. I don’t know anything about the hotel’s history (except that it must have been closed in 2016 or 2017), but I assume that it was opened in the 1970s – it didn’t make a super old impression, but it definitely wasn’t a modern, flashy place; no jacuzzi or even pools, no beds shaped like rockets, cars or sports venues, no ceiling mirrors or elaborate lighting system (like at last year’s *Minigolf Love Hotel*, which I actually explored a day after this one…). Just a clean classy location with large rooms oozing understatement.

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Sea Shell Museum

Posted in Abandoned on 2020/12/08| 10 Comments »

The abandoned Sea Shell Museum was on the top of my list of places to visit for quite a while – here is what I found when I finally made it there…

It’s always dangerous if you let your imagination fill the blanks of missing information as it tends to use the most positive outcome possible, while reality tends to do… the opposite – all you online daters out there know what I mean!
About three years ago I first saw the abandoned Sea Shell Museum on a Japanese blog and I was fascinated! There were only a handful of photos, but they looked amazing… and outside pictures of the building made it look gigantic, so I imagined it to be much like the *Takeshima Fantasy Museum*, an active sea shell museum in the outskirts of Nagoya – at first I even thought it was the exact same place as it was closed for a few years between 2010 and 2014.
Phew, was I wrong! Not only was the abandoned Sea Shell Museum in a different part of Japan (which I found out after about 1.5 years…), it was also much smaller and a lot less colorful (which I learned the hard way another 1.5 later – yes, it took me that long to find a reasonable way to explore that damn thing!). While the Takashima Fantasy Museum features a vast area of colorful and imaginative seal shell sculptures, the abandoned Sea Shell Museum only had a rather small display… which wasn’t that colorful. Both places have a museum part, which are about the same size, but make up for about 10% of the space at the Fantasy Museum and a whopping 90% of the space at the Sea Shell Museum. Objectively not bad at all, unique and super interesting actually, but not what I had dreamed up in my mind based on the photos I first saw. Expectations are the worst – never have them! They are barely ever surpassed, only mildly satisfying when fulfilled, and more often than not you set yourself up for disappointments…
Opened in 1973 and in business till the late 00s the now abandoned Sea Shell Museum was on the second and third floor of a rest stop by the sea, while the first floor was used as a restaurant and omiyage shop. Now the whole building is decaying rapidly, despite the lack of blatant vandalism – there is some, but surprisingly little, considering that the place isn’t exactly the secret anymore it was three years ago.

I was hoping for a Top 20 location, but the abandoned Sea Shell Museum would have a hard time to even make it on my Top 200 list. It was still a good location, but the whole exploration was rushed, the museum was much smaller and less artistic than expected… and the mix of dark corners, bright light coming in through a few openings, and reflective display surfaces made the whole place kinda hard to shoot. Overall the *abandoned sex museums I’ve visited* were much more interesting – and a lot of *abandoned schools* had similar items left behind. Add the time and effort (borderline hassle) involved in exploring this admittedly unusual museum, and I’m sure you’ll understand that I’m glad that I was able to finally cross it off my (relatively short) list of famous places to explore. A revisit is highly unlikely though, so please enjoy the following gallery.

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Game Boy Mailbox

Posted in Abandoned on 2020/12/01| 14 Comments »

Geeks, freaks, and nerds rejoice – I finally made it to the abandoned Game Boy Mailbox!

The abandoned Game Box Mailbox can be traced back to four years ago, when a Japanese angler was looking for a fishing spot in the mountains and instead found a supersized original Game Boy, once used as an advertising display in Japanese stores, converted into a mailbox. Unlike most non-urbexers (and some bad apples within the community) the guy actually cared and didn’t blurt out the location to the world – and so even some well-connected and respected Japanese explorers haven’t been to this little hidden gem. It took me a few years, too, but when I finally made it there on a beautiful autumn day I took pictures from pretty much every angle… because there was not much else to see or do nearby. Somebody put a regular mailbox into the strictly decorative plastic case (none of the buttons are or ever were functional – also the proportions were more than just slightly off!) and used it as such. Since the thing hasn’t been cleaned in quite a while and the nearby house also is in questionable condition it’s pretty safe to say that the Game Boy Mailbox really is abandoned – though there were indications that the house is still used occasionally, maybe as a weekend home.

For most people the Game Boy Mailbox is probably just a grey plastic case, but as a huge Nintendo fan I had the time of my life and took pictures of that thing from pretty much all possible angles. Sunshine, warm autumn day, bamboo grove in the background, autumn leaves surrounding, a remote mountain road – and a now rare piece of video game history. Everything came together perfectly! And if you like (arcade) games as much as I do, you might wanna check out my article about the abandoned *Arcade Machine Hotel*!

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