Abandoned Kansai

A beautiful pre-war mansion or a large countryside hospital with its own operating room? Well, you deserve both, so here you get both!

About 10 years ago the Nagano Countryside Clinic was THE abandoned hospital in Japan! It was not as secret as *The Doctor’s Shack*, not as far from Tokyo as *The Tokushima Countryside Clinic* and long abandoned before the *Wakayama Hospital*, all of which are urbex classics in Japan now, too – and yet it featured not only the usual array of bottled chemicals and pre-war medicine books you typically find in countryside doctors’ offices, it also had some early versions of modern equipment, though I wouldn’t be able to tell you what was which as I am not in the medical profession myself; but it looked cool, kinda steampunk-ish, stuff I’d actually use as decoration pieces if I’d had the space or the money for them.
Which brings me to a topic that is more and more annoying to me the bigger my social media channels on *Facebook* and *Twitter* grow (please follow for time-exclusive brand-new material – and don’t forget: sharing is caring!) as it’s not just fellow explorers following each other anymore, but more and more people who don’t really know what urbex is about… or happily ignore what it stands for. They just enjoy the photos and sometimes have a completely different set of values, which is perfectly fine… unless they start to rant about how they would totally take home this and that – or even worse: ask me if I took it and whether I’d sell it to them. Which to me is borderline insulting. “Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints!”, a motto widely respected amongst explorers worldwide, but especially in Japan; unfortunately less and less apparently, as the number of people trampling through abandoned places with smartphones seems to be on the rise everywhere. Anyway, I am always grateful when the people exploring before me didn’t loot or vandalize, so of course I try to keep everything as I found it – I don’t even like to move things around or to snoop through drawers and boxes. “But when a place is abandoned nobody owns those things anymore and they are just going to waste, so you / I can as well take it!” Uhm, no! Just because a place is rundown and easily accessible doesn’t mean that there is no owner anymore. In Japan the vast majority of abandoned places are actually abandoned, but especially in Europe and the States a ton of “abandoned” places have alarms or even security, so the whole urbex thing is a huge grey area with different legal implications, as I’ve mentioned before – but removing things from a place, especially with the intention to enrich yourself, is a completely different level, both legally and morally! AFAIK in Japan for example even taking bulky waste from the sidewalk is considered theft! If you find money or items with a value of more than 10 euros in Germany you have to try and find the owner (usually by bringing it to the nearest police station) or you are guilty of stealing by finding – and in that case no owner is in sight either. So again, just because there is no apparent owner doesn’t mean that you can take whatever you want! Unfortunately I’m probably preaching to the choir as people interested enough in urbex to read a blog already know and respect that – it’s usually casuals on social media that annoy and sometimes really scare me as I run this blog to entertain people, not to reveal locations or guide looters to new treasures.
Why this rant about stealing now? Because Nagano Countryside Clinic was loaded with potentially valuable items! (I don’t even know for sure, I don’t watch shows like Antiques Roadshow.) Everything from old medical books, medical equipment, and medical devices to private items like letters, furniture and gramophone records. The Historical Village of Hokkaido in Sapporo has a fully restored countryside clinic as one of their exhibition houses, the Kondo Clinic – and the Nagano Countryside Clinic was kind of a rundown version of that hospital. So when you look at the gallery below you’ll see a ton of pre-war items, of which I took none. Not even one of those large, heavy shellac records. Because I’m not a looter and because I wanted to give the explorers following me the same opportunity to enjoy the sight of this extraordinary location in as much of its glory as possible.
And before the people out there with questionable morals start to drool too much, let me give you a quick rundown of the Nagano Countryside Clinic: It was opened in 1910, its owner apparently studied in Berlin and perhaps Freiburg (according to letters on a table), and it was closed around 1980. In the early 2010s it was a popular abandoned place with many names – and rumors of imminent demolition started to spread soon after. In 2014 my buddy *Hamish* and I were in the area due to other locations, so we had a quick look. Much to our surprise the clinic was still standing and accessible, resulting in a 1.5 hour long exploration until it was too dark inside to take photos – and the use of flashlights was too risky as it would have probably alarmed neighbors or people passing by. So we came back the next day, an hour earlier this time, for another go at it; 2.5 hours this time. (Hence some similar photos, but also pictures of the operating room in darkness and well-lit.) After some more years of waiting, construction workers finally showed up at the Nagano Countryside Clinic in 2018 – not demolish, but to renovate / restore the building, probably cleaning it out first. So obviously there still was an owner, proving all those questionable characters wrong who are trying to convince me that looting “abandoned” buildings is a victimless crime. Stop drooling, it’s over – one way or another. Unfortunately this also means that everybody else had to wait a few years longer than necessary for this article. And now just imagine what other locations are waiting in my vault when I had the patience to wait seven years for this spectacular place to be released… 🙂

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