Abandoned Kansai

A week ago I was sitting in an Okinawan park, minding my own business nibbling on an amazing artisan raisin-cranberry-walnuts-orange peal-outmeal melange / fruit bread when all of sudden… BAM… the Pflying Drapists did one of their noisy air shows as a reminder that necessary evil discomforts us all sometimes to prevent unnecessary evils like Winnie the Xi(thead) from acting up at any time like the dementia-toddler he looks like.
Mid-January meant that it was time to get into exploring again – and the question I had to answer for myself was: Are historic ruins part of urban exploration? I included some in the early days, for example *Tomogashima (a.k.a. Laputa Island, after Studio Ghibli’s Castle in the Sky)* and the *Ganne Fortress*, but not so much in recent years – I still explore a lot more modern ruins than I publish here, so why waste time on historic ruins, that are covered by experts in their field much better anyway?
Now, Okinawa is a small island (chain) with a booming tourism industry, so the amount and quality of abandoned places there is definitely in decline. On the other hand, I just found out about that amazingly overgrown bridge from before World War 2… So why not?
The old Tengan Bridge, a reinforced concrete structure, was completed around 1934 – the time when Japan started to rampage around Asia in a way that is not fondly remembered and kind of is responsible for today’s flight shows near Naha. The bridge was a vital piece of infrastructure in Uruma City, used by vehicles and pedestrians alike. In late March 1945 the US Forces were about to land in western Okinawa, so the Japanese military blew up the bridge in an effort to slow down the invad–… liberators. Guess what – it didn’t really work! The bridge was blown up, but the Americans just bulldozed some earth over the broken bridge and happily continued their way. (Well, as happy as they could have been in those days – it wasn’t really the land of pineapple and shikuwasa omiyage yet, was it? Little has changed in the last 80 years. Even back then just building new from scratch was cheaper than removing the old and starting over again, so that’s what happened. A new Tengan bridge was built right next to the old one and the old one got more or less forgotten, except for the one sign with some information and a photo. The bridge became increasingly overgrown, which looked really cool on pictures and still did when I first heard about the bridge two or three weeks ago. When I showed up though… Uruma City had given the bridge and its surroundings a serious haircut – or rather: plant cut. Much like Okinawa almost a century prior it got liberated, but at what cost? Still a pretty cool location and overall a fun half-day trip from Naha, but not as spectacular as I hoped it would be. Well, and it gave me an opportunity to switch 2 degree weather with 20 degree weather. Now back in sleety Osucka both the nice temperatures and the delicious fruit bread are nothing but a cozy memory…

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