Abandoned Kansai

The long-awaited video game Ghost of Yotei will be out soon, so let’s celebrate the release with an abandoned place not on Mount Yotei, but with nice views of Hokkaido’s famous mountain! (Personally I’m more of an Onimusha guy – super excited for the new installment “Way of the Sword”, especially since you couldn’t pay me enough to go Kyoto these days…)

A few years ago I developed a strange fascination with abandoned ski-jumping hills – or rather the constructions use to jump from those hills, called Schanze in German; not to be confused with the military fortification, sconce (most famously used in Wolfsschanze, but let’s not go down that dark road). In the autumn of 2021 I did my own Vierschanzentournee (Four Hills Tournament) when visiting four abandoned ski-jumping hills during one Hokkaido trip. The most famous one probably being the View of Yotei Ski-Jumping Hill, also known as Asahigaoka Park Ski-Jumping Hill in Kutchan.
It’s absolutely beyond me why this abandoned place is not more famous in the first place as it is part of a ski area and visible from Kutchan Station, right next to Little Australia, the bogan winter wonderland called Niseko. Tens of thousands of people must see the large red metal construction every year, yet neither tourists nor urban explorers seem to pay much attention to it, despite it being a dream to explore – easy access, outdoors, no fences or Keep Out! signs (except for the welded-up main inrun tower), spectacular views of Mount Yotei – an active stratovolcano nicknamed Yezo Fuji for its shape and one of the “100 famous mountains in Japan” (a list compiled for a book by mountaineer Kyuya Fukada in 1964 and made popular by then Crown Prince and now Emperor Naruhito). To me Mount Yotei was just another mountain at the time when I took pictures of the abandoned structures, and it was pure coincidence that it ended up in some of them – I was there in October of 2021, the game was announced a year ago, on September 24th 2024…
The hill was first used for ski jumps back in 1934. In 1952 a new inrun tower was set up at the current location, a larger one followed in 1963, which was later enlarged to the red monster we see abandoned now. Between 1964 and 1996 the most famous competition on the Schanze was the Major’s Cup of Kutchan Town, which attracted famous ski jumpers like Hiroya Saito, who won the cup in 1992 – and a gold medal with the Japanese team at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano (fun fact – Saito was born in nearby Yoichi, mostly known for the Nikka whisky distillery). The exploration itself was relaxed and uneventful for the most part. Nice autumn day, which means a lot of elements of the ski-jumping hill (inrun towers, observation tower for the judges, landing slope, out-run…) were mostly overgrown. Vegetation grows fast in Japan, even in Hokkaido, but autumn leaves were just past their peak, so the whole area was beautiful. In winter you can see much more of the facility, and you can use the lift to get up the darn hill, but overall it was a very pleasant exploration, a bit reminiscent of *Sapporo Dreamland*. If you are now curious about other abandoned ski-jumping hills, I recommend checking out my articles about the *Hokkaido Ski-Jumping Hill* and the *Sprungschanze Katzenbuckel*.
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