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Archive for January, 2025

Boobs Clinic

Posted in Abandoned, Hospital, Japan, Photography, Shikoku, Travel, Urbex on 2025/01/29| 4 Comments »

I love abandoned hospitals! Always have, always will – ever since I walked into the *Tokushima Countryside Clinic* about a year after I started exploring abandoned places. It wasn’t a standalone hospital as we are used to in the West, more like a traditional Japanese mansion with a pharmacy and a study and an examination room. Most of those clinics are basically the doctor’s home with a section for business – and I usually named them clinics here on the blog, while hospitals are standalone buildings with rooms for inpatients. *Hospitals here on Abandoned Kansai* also tend to be rather modern whereas most clinics are from 50s or 60s, some even pre-WW2, like the aforementioned Tokushima Countryside Clinic.
The Boobs Clinic (named after two pictures on a wall in the office, which hopefully were put up after the clinic closed – it wasn’t named that because it was home to a cosmetic surgeon, or any surgeon for that matter) in rural Ehime prefecture looked like any other house in the area, maybe on the larger side. If there had ever been signs that it was a doctor’s office, they had been removed a long time ago. At the time of my visit in late 2020 (exploring during the pandemic was the best!) it was just another house on the main road of a small town.
Since I wasn’t in charge of that trip, I actually had serious doubts when approaching the building, because it could as well still have been inhabited – and you really don’t want to walk into somebody’s home while the people living there are just minding their own business…
To be honest, this wasn’t a very memorable exploration. According to the photo data we were in and out within 45 minutes and the main reason I remember it, is because of the pictures I’ve taken – I actually had already written that I didn’t take any in the rest of the house, but then I checked the set to create a selection for the gallery of this article… and I had to rewrite this paragraph, because apparently I had taken a picture of the not so pretty living room. That being said, the whole building was in bad condition and partly falling apart, with the rest being moldy. A decent location worth stopping for for sure, but nothing spectacular when you have more than 10 years of exploring in Japan under you belt (at the time). In addition it was a very busy day with a total of four locations and hundreds of kilometers of driving, a lot on countryside roads through small towns. I hope you’ll enjoy the gallery, but there really is not much to say about this location as it is virtually unknown and exploring it was a surprise to me, too. My guess is that it was built in the 50s or 60s and provided care for the surrounding villages – handwritten patient files similar to those found in other clinics as well as various medicine and various medical instruments were all over the place, which was probably closed when the doctor running it retired or died. The end. Literally.

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Sapporo Dreamland (Teine Olympic Amusement Park)

Posted in Abandoned, Amusement Park, Asia, Haikyo, Hokkaido, Japan, Photography, Sapporo, Travel, Urbex on 2025/01/13| 7 Comments »

The demolition of Nara Dreamland in late 2016 / early 2017 was devastating, especially for explorers living in Kansai. Since then I explored several other abandoned theme parks, usually to leave disappointed. But now it’s time to introduce you to the Teine Olympic Amusement Park – or as I like to call it: Sapporo Dreamland!

To make one thing clear: Sapporo Dreamland has nothing to do with Nara Dreamland or its actual sister park, the 2002 closed and 2003 demolished Yokohama Dreamland. The term is just snappier and more memorable than the rather clunky official name Teine Olympic Amusement Park. And as much as I hate revealing too much about locations, this one is so big and so unique, you could probably find it via GoogleLens or some smartass on Reddit anyway. Needless to say that I also wouldn’t be able to write anything about the park’s history, little as is known anyway. So… let’s get to it.

I first went to Mount Teine in 2012, when I arrived in Sapporo a day earlier than my co-explorer for a *Haikyo in Hokkaido* road trip – to kill time I went to check out the *Mt. Teine Ski Lift* and *The Olympic Ruins Of Sapporo 1972* solo. On my way to the latter I actually must have seen the iconic blue Ferris wheel of the already abandoned Mount Teine Olympic Amusement Park, but I guess I was so focused on the task at hand that I didn’t pay attention to it. Or maybe I thought it was still active. Who knows? In any case, more than a decade ago I wrote freely about the previously mentioned locations and apparently neither me nor anybody else was like: But what else is nearby? Some time in the second half of the 2010s I heard that the bobsleigh goal of the Olympic Ruins was demolished in early 2017, so I had a look at Mount Teine again and made a note of that strange blurry blob of unmarked something nearby – and forgot about it again… until I saw some amazing photos of an abandoned theme park posted by a friend on Twitter. Now, I could have gone down the easy path and asked for the location, but I seriously HATE IT when strangers do that to me, so I hardly ever do it to my friends; maybe a handful of times in 15 years. Finding locations is part of the urbex experience, and exploring a location earned is so much more fulfilling than just going there like it was a tourist attraction on GoogleMaps. So I had a closer look at my map of unexplored potential abandoned places… and to my surprise the photos fit exactly to the former blurry blob of unmarked something, which was now displayed in much higher resolution! The goddamn thing had been right in front of my eyes for more than half a decade!

Now, Hokkaido isn’t really in day trip range from Kansai (though technically it is…), so it took me a while to get back up there, just in time before Covid hit. Not that it really mattered, because unlike most countries, there were hardly any travel restriction within Japan – getting in or out was a nightmare, but early 2020 till late 2022 was the golden age of domestic tourism in Japan. It was AWESOME! *I even wrote an article about it back in 2022.* (The only negative experience I made during that time was getting denied entry to the Pear Museum in Kurashiki early during the pandemic, long before the vaccine, as they restricted access to Tottori prefecture residents.) Anyway, a total of 7 years passed between my first and my second visit to Mount Teine… but it was really worth the wait as the abandoned Teine Olympic Amusement Park turned out to be Nara Dreamland 2. Maybe even better than Nara Dreamland 2, thanks to the park’s most iconic ride – a gigantic blue Ferris wheel at Plaza II!

At the time of being closed for good after the 2009 season, the entry fee to Sapporo Dreamland was 2500 Yen (an extra 300 Yen around Golden Week!). Due to cold weather at “best” and tons of snow at “worst” the park was only open from Golden Week till late September / early October, which is a very short season to make money. (Ski season on the same mountain is usually from late November / early December till late April, but you had to add a few more weeks to make the rides winter-proof / ready for operation.) It surely didn’t help that even during that time, the park was only open on Saturdays, Sundays, and national holidays – with the exception of summer school holidays, when the Teine Olympic Amusement Park was open every day. The place also had a reputation for being rather run-down and having occasional accidents, so it was probably good that they shut it down before something really bad happened, like at *Expoland*, where a student died due to a rollercoaster accident.

Speaking of rollercoasters – the park had two of them, though neither was modern, like the ones you might know from USJ or Fuji-Q Highland. In total there were 26 attractions, the latest being an area called Exciting Dinosaur Land (Wakuwaku Kyōryū Rando), constructed in 2004 – two or three dozen dinosaurs on about 500 square meters (sorry, I have no idea what’s that in Fahrenheit…) with some of them being parts of rides or slides. The dinosaur playground was located right between Plaza I and Plaza II, the two main areas of Teine Olympic Amusement Park, which were connected by a short path through the surrounding forest. The origins of the park date back to 1966, when Sapporo won the bid for the Olympic Games – six years before the actual event. The city was actually one of the few that really benefited from the Games as it managed to make a profit and also opened the first section of its newly built subway system, now consisting of three lines. Hence the nostalgia and bids for future games, despite the fact that those most likely will turn into a disaster, similar to Osaka and the Expo (1970 / 2025).

The first time I explored Sapporo Dreamland was back in 2019 on a rather unpleasant spring day – not only can you see patches of snow on some photos, but the weather was a bit windy and constantly changing between foggy, drizzly, and overcast. All the photos in the gallery below are from that visit, which took me about 2.5 hours – admittedly a bit rushed, but while I was in the Dinosaur Land, I got an excitement boost when seeing somebody driving around in a car, which brought back terrible memories from when I first explored Nara Dreamland almost a decade prior. Fortunately I was able to hide in the fog, but as soon as the car was gone I moved on to Plaza I, where I took only a few quick shots before leaving. The atmosphere there was mind-blowing though, especially when exploring solo and not knowing exactly what to expect. It is absolutely beyond me, why this location is not more popular and all over the internet. Even among Japanese urbexers it’s not even close to being Top 20 in my guesstimation, probably not even Top 50, despite being rather easily accessible. Nara Dreamland on the other hand was all over the web back in the mid-2010s, a few years after I started writing about it. I met more tourists at Nara Dreamland than Sapporo Dreamland most likely had explorers in total. Let’s see if that changes after this article. I kept my mouth shut for almost six years, but I wanted to celebrate the 15th Anniversary of Abandoned Kansai with a spectacular location – and on this day 15 years ago I published my (partly failed) exploration of the *Mount Atago Cable Car*, the first real article. Who would have thought that 15 years later I would still be exploring and writing about it? My first exploration of Sapporo Dreamland wasn’t my last, of course. Since then I’ve been back twice – once on a sunny late spring afternoon and once on a rainy autumn day. So if one or more of the international urbex tourists picks up on Sapporo Dreamland later this year, I’ll be ready with another article… and another article. And then I have another large, abandoned amusement park on hold – one I haven’t seen anywhere on any urbex site, not even Japanese ones. Not to mention all the other spectacular places I’ve been exploring. I kept quiet about Sapporo Dreamland for more than five years… Imagine what and how many other locations you don’t know about yet! 15 years into it and the best is still to come!

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Japanese Ossuary

Posted in Abandoned, Chugoku, Haikyo, Okayama, Photography, Sacred Site, Travel on 2025/01/01| 2 Comments »

An abandoned ossuary / columbarium / cinerarium? Now that’s something you don’t see every day!

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you probably realized that I am not religious at all. I grew up Roman-Catholic and was dragged to church by my grandma every Sunday for years, quickly realizing that it wasn’t for me and just a great waste of time – so I started to play video games with a friend every Sunday morning and left the house while everybody was still sleeping, just to have a decent excuse for not going to church anymore. Now I care about religion so little that I’m not even sure if I consider myself an atheist or agnostic. I mention this, because today’s abandoned place is quite unusual and a far cry from the regular abandoned shrine I usually post as the first location of the year in the spirit of hatsumode. So if I confuse terminology (you know, like all rosaries are prayer beads, but not all prayer beads are rosaries), please forgive me – which should be in the spirit of your made-up invisible friend / ruler anyway. (And if you are upset with me for not being a believer: There are about 10000 religions in the world. You don’t believe in 9999 of them. For me it’s just 1 more…) A while ago I went exploring with a couple of Japanese friends, which usually means that I have no say in which locations we’ll check out that day – and that is kind of a gamble, because sometimes I waste hours at places I’ve already been to, whereas sometimes they drag my sorry ass to ruins I didn’t even know existed.
After spending quite some time on a late lunch we stopped next to a regular temple of a quiet neighborhood in the outskirts of Okayama. Parking was sparse, but we found a spot and walked past the temple and up a gentle forested slope. The path was completely covered by years’ worth of dried foliage (clearly nobody was raking and cleaning there, so I guess it’s a miracle that there never was a wildfire…) – and I still had no clue where we were going to (fortunately I wasn’t murdered and burnt beyond recognition that day, though it would have fitted the location, as it turned out…). Two or three switchbacks later we finally stood in front of the strangest structure I had seen in a long time – a long one storey tall concrete structure with three entrances and a spikey ornament on top of each room. It kind of reminded me of the *now famous stupa in an abandoned religious park*, but I really didn’t know what to make of it. Unfortunately were running out of time as it has been overcast all day and we were on a forested slope. We were four people, which meant everybody was shooting in one of the rooms, plus one person outside. A rather rushed exploration, but fun in an eerie way. Later I did some research and found out that the place was an ossuary built in the 1970s and used for about 30 years. A really interesting location that would have been even better if it would have been located closer to the abandoned *Japanese Crematorium* I explored a few years earlier.

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