Abandoned Kansai

Hiking is kinda of a strange hobby, isn’t it? On the one hand it’s as simple and literally down to earth as it gets. On the other hand it’s something only people with a certain living standard do, because if you can’t afford a car, a bike or even public transportation and you have to walk everywhere you need to go, the last thing on your mind is walking some more when you don’t have to – but this time for fun!
Strangely enough I realized that on my *second trip to North Korea* when we were driving up a mountain overlooking Rason and some people in the group were asking if we could hike the last few kilometers. The guardguide’s response to that was a sincerely surprised “Why the f#ck would anybody want to walk somewhere if it’s not necessary? Are you rich capitalists out of your mind? You consider walking a hobby?!” reaction, just slightly more friendly. Which actually goes along with experiences worldwide – hiking and mountaineering as a hobby was “invented” in the late 18th, early 19th century, at around the same time as motorized transportation, and became really popular after WW2, when common people in rich countries could afford some means of individual transport. Up till then people avoided the unpopulated wilderness as much as they could, aside from the occasional adventurer, poet or monk.
In Japan hiking and mountaineering became more popular from 1964 on, when Kyuya Fukada released his book “100 Famous Japanese Mountains” (日本百名山, Nihon Hyaku-meizan), later creating a boom when young Crown Prince and now Emperor Naruhito used it as a guideline for his own alpinist ambitions. Almost 60 years later Japan is a paradise for hobby hikers and mountaineers with trails and mountains covering everything from easy day trips to months long adventures on one of ten long distance nature trails with a length of up to 4600 kilometers.

The Hiking Trail Youth Hostel was located directly next to one of the most famous footpaths in Japan and opened right in time for the outdoor boom in 1965. Like so many things in Japan it wasn’t built for eternity and closed in 1985, though the upper building lasted till 2002, when earthquake safety regulations forced to shut it down. Being located at the edge of a forest on a slope, the abandoned youth hostel made for a gloomy exploration on a late afternoon – it was the kind of place you expect to find a dead body (which actually happened not too long ago at an abandoned hotel in Miyazaki prefecture!) or to get killed yourself, so I was lucky to have been once again with my friends Dan and Kyoko. Technically it was one of those rundown, vandalized, moldy pieces of “unexplorables”, but the light, though difficult, was beautiful – and some areas offered great photo opportunities, for example the staircase taken back by nature and the tatami room with the classic geisha dolls and the old TV. I don’t think any of us enjoyed exploring the Hiking Trail Youth Hostel, but I walked away with a handful of good photos that elevated the whole set as well with the warm and fuzzy feeling of having explored another abandoned youth hostel – only my second one in total, after the much cleaner *Japanese Youth Hostel* a few years prior.

(*Like Abandoned Kansai on Facebook* or *follow us on Twitter* if you don’t want to miss the latest articles and exclusive content – and subscribe to the *video channel on Youtube* to receive a message right after a new video is online…)