Abandoned Kansai

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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