What do Star Wars and Nicolas Cage have in common? Not much, really – just that his latest movie, Prisoners of the Ghostland, was shot at a location that in winter looks like the snowy battleground of Hoth!
Usually I don’t do revisits. They bore me, they bore you, they don’t do well here on Abandoned Kansai. But there are exploration days when I’m not in charge of the location selection, which sometimes is a good thing (as I get taken to places I didn’t even know existed) and sometimes is a bad thing as I’m stuck at places I don’t like or already have documented extensively. In early 2018 I was on the road with a large group of people (the largest ever, almost a dozen explorers in two large cars) and it was really chaotic as nobody wanted to take the lead (or listen to the only gaijin they apparently considered pretty much dead weight), so there were endless time-consuming consensus discussions, but not much exploring – and of course in the afternoon we ended up at the almost touristy *Sumitomo Osaka Cement Factory, which I had explored about 4 years earlier on a late summer morning*. Seriously annoyed by the inability of the group to make decisions I teeth-gnashingly got out of the warm car and into the mid-winter cold. (While there is no winter in central Osaka, you can definitely get to some snowy areas in day trip range. Not real winter like in Hokkaido, but at least it’s worth putting on a jacket…)
The different time of the day and especially the different season with the completely different weather made this one of the few revisits actually worth my (and your!) time. The outdoor part wasn’t that much fun since the area was completely covered in snow. Not deeply, but enough to make walking around a bit iffy as you never knew what you would step on / in next – and it wasn’t until I got home and looked at the photos that I realized that the area had a very strong Star Wars vibe; like after the battle on the ice planet Hoth. A completely different atmosphere than in early September… and an almost completely overgrown building was all of a sudden accessible again. In summer vines and other plants covered pretty much all of the ground floor windows and especially the doors, so the it was only upon my second visit that I could enter the building – which wasn’t spectacular by any standards, but a nice addition to the exploration and the photo set, despite the rapidly fading light.
The winter / Hoth story would have been enough to justify another article, but fortunately I waited a little bit longer and so it happened that Nicolas fucking Cage, hero in two of the best action movies of all time, shot his currently latest movie at this exact same location in late 2019. Of course I found that out after the fact or otherwise I would have tried to sneak a peek. But hey, it’s still the same location I’ve explored twice extensively. Interestingly enough a young Japanese woman called Riko Shibata somehow got access to the venue or at least the film crew – Cage met her in Shiga when she was 24 and he was 55, about one and a half years later they got married in early March of 2021; her first, his fifth marriage. Oh, and the movie is called Prisoners of the Ghostland, directed by Sion Sono and probably way too violent for my fragile little mind. So I hope one day I’ll be able to skip through a Blu-Ray or a stream and watch the scenes shot at the *Sumitomo Osaka Cement Factory*.
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