Nothing like a spring exploration with friends of a large original find – even if there is an active company right next door…
The Japan Agricultural Cooperatives, commonly known as JA or JA Group, is a coalition of 694 local cooperatives that supports its members with producing, packaging, transporting and marketing agricultural products – if you’ve ever been to any place in Japan that sells local products or driven through the countryside, you’ve most likely seen their logo. They’re basically everywhere and a surprisingly powerful organization for a country not exactly known for its unions.
Since this location was an original find I don’t know much about it. Apparently it existed since the 1970s and was used for about 30 years. It consisted of a large plot of fenced land as well as several structures, including a large boarding school like building with a cafeteria, classrooms, bedrooms, and a pretty big shared bath on a slope, accessible via a bridge from the second floor. Right next to the main building was a huge facility to… test vehicles? I’m not much of a car guy, but there was equipment labeled Speed and Torque – interestingly enough it didn’t look like that vehicles could be repaired there, but there was a rather old fashioned gas pump in the back.
What made this a bit of a challenge were two things: the rather long driveway with a gate at the main road about 500 meters away, and an active company right across the street, with quite a few cars coming and going even on an otherwise lazy Sunday morning. Fortunately the fences weren’t much of a barrier – and due to a medium amount of vandalism neither was access to the buildings. Other people were obviously less worried about creating noise than Dan, Kyoko, and I, so doors were pried open, windows and mirrors were broken, and we even spotted some graffiti. Nothing artsy, just the average scribbling you usually find in Japan.
The weather, my company, the gauge corner of the car facility, and the fact that this was an original find made this exploration an above average one – despite our buzzing neighbor it was a rather relaxed experience that offered some unspectacular yet still interesting photo opportunities. I never had the opportunity to spend a few days at an continuation school to learn something over the span of multiple days which I could have read up on in a few hours, so it was nice to see what such a facility looks like in Japan.
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Abandoned Kansai 
The stuff you mentioned for vehicles looks like it was for doing wheel alignments. The rollers on the floor are where they would have parked the vehicle to do this.
Thanks a lot for the info, much appreciated!
The machine is a vehicle dynamometer for measuring power/torque of vehicles. And the other section near it was for wheel alignments. Maybe they were testing or developing cars here?
Interesting… Thanks a lot, Hamish! They were probably testing cars there, I doubt that they developed them. But testing sounds like a possibility, it was a JA facility after all.
I agree with Hamish regarding the equipment. More a ‘motorcycle guy’, than a ‘car guy’ myself, but the ‘torque tester’ is a dynamometer, and can be used to measure the effects of changes to the tune of a vehicle, to measure whether it’s performing better (or worse) after changes to the tune, or when new parts are added to the motor. I don’t know why such a facility would have accommodation though. Maybe it was run by a large auto-maker at some stage, and they kept staff there, away from their normal homes.
Maybe the JA was testing vehicles of their members there to optimize their performance? I think it was a facility for seminar, so it sounds plausible that they had some hands-on lesson, making sure that everything is running smoothly? (But it could also be that the dynamometer building was used before or after by another company – the buildings were not connected and could have been at separate properties at one point.)
Hey Florian. If you ever run out of abandoned places to visit, please keep in touch with us. I and Im sure a lot of your other fans would be glad to see your photography output even if it isn’t urbex. Thanks for another cool photo shoot.
Thank you very much for your kind words, Elias! As long as I live in Japan I won’t run out of abandoned places, I’m 100% sure about that. And even if I stop exploring for whatever reason (moving abroad, bad health, no time, …), I still have enough material to run Abandoned Kansai for another 4 years or so. 🙂 There are so many great places still to come, a lot of them in my Top 20 explorations of all time!
cool :). i also agree with Hamish on the equipment. one thing i may add tho, the dynamometer is not very comon thing in a regular car service place, wich makes me think the place (or a portion of it) couldve been a tuner/custom garage at some point. it was and is very popular amongs tuners to do the “dyno runs”, just like they like to play with theyr wheel aligments, especially the drift guys, wich there was alot of back in the day in japan. there used to be alot of shops like this in japan as modyfiing cars was a very big thing especially in the 90s, it still is but its not as massive like it was then, so a bunch of these garages went out of business. i actually recall one more from your posts too haha.