Abandoned Kansai

There are two or three styles of hotel rooms in Japan – if you know those, you basically know them all. Yet (almost) every abandoned Japanese hotel has something special. A rooftop bar, an interesting shared bath, an indoor shrine, a pool area with slides, a vast garden… or a room filled with boxes containing cut off cat paws!

The Cat Paw Hotel was an original find I made at the height of my exploration career in 2017. At first it was just a mark on a map in the outskirts of an onsen town, far away from the StreetView cars. The grey spot also could have been an apartment building… or worse: still in use. But after so many years of exploring you at least have a good gut feeling whether or not a place is abandoned, so when I had the opportunity to visit the area a year later on my last big exploration trip with my buddy Hamish of course I took advantage of it.
At first sight the Cat Paw Hotel was just a random abandoned hotel like so many others. Large lobby, vandalized rooms that looked the same, big party rooms that only differed in size, a somewhat boring bar with a stage and a jukebox, an emptied souvenir shop – even the yellow, green, and black shared bath (where somebody took a dump in the sauna; at least go outside, you animals!) wasn’t that spectacular. What set the Cat Paw Hotel apart from every other abandoned hotel I’ve explored was a room Hamish called me to. “You have to see this!” is something I’ve heard quite often, but barely ever was it that true. In the back of the hotel, at the end of a corridor with guest rooms, were two storage rooms for the gift shop. One where all the cheaply made plastic junk was once stored (not anymore; ransacked, too). And another one filled with boxes upon boxes of what looked like cat paws to me. Now, I’m not an animal expert, so cat paw is / was my best guess. And when I posted a photo a while ago on *Facebook* nobody had a better suggestion. Which is curios, because to the best of my knowledge cat paws are not a good look charm like… for example… rabbit’s feet. Especially in Japan, where cats are really, really loved! And while rabbit’s feet can be rather easily harvested as their meat is quite popular in some parts of the world, hardly anybody eats cats unless they have to. There also were no signs of them in the gift shop, so why would this hotel would store countless boxes with probably thousands of paws? Paws that didn’t have attachments for key rings… or even packaging for that matter. Really, really strange…

But memorable, and when it comes to explorations, that’s an important factor. I for sure won’t forget the Cat Paw Hotel – and you probably neither. We’ll all forget the dump in the sauna, the weird shared bath and the large dining room… but the cat paws we’ll remember. And tell our friends about it. And hope, that the next exploration will be as memorable!

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