All abandoned: Chernobyl / Pripyat, Nara Dreamland, Anti-Zombie Fortress, Japanese Sex Museum – and many, many more! Plus: North Korea Special – 2 trips, 16 days / 14 nights! As seen on CNN…
Last week I wrote about Nara Dreamland, one of the best abandoned places in the world. This week I write about the Toyama Mountain Hotel, one of the most miserable places I’ve ever explored…
I have to admit that this spring day didn’t start well in general. The hospital my buddy Hamish and I intended to explore turned out not be abandoned (a car with license plates parked in front of it, a motion detector activated camera at the entrance, most likely somebody still living in the same building…), same with the skiing area we went too next… and another one that was probably already demolished; in any case, we couldn’t find any signs of it. Meanwhile it started to rain, which is pretty much always a downer on urbex days. Sure, SOME photos benefit from rain, but most don’t and the overall experience severely suffers. It’s just not fun being wet all the time while worrying about your camera equipment. And wet disgusting stuff tends to smell worse than dry disgusting stuff, too…
The Toyama Mountain Hotel was built on a slope and after trying a couple of doors, it became pretty quickly apparent that we would have to enter through the lowest floor; through a tiny emergency door, maybe half or even less the size of a regular door. But at least we found one that was unlocked. But that didn’t mean that we reached dry ground. Thanks to a lot of flat roofs and ongoing rain, the Toyama Mountain Hotel was probably the wettest place I’ve ever explored; water dripping everywhere. To a degree that I felt like it was actually raining inside the building! Because it kinda was…
Anyway, Hamish and I had to make our way up through the dark, wet underbelly of the hotel. The boiler room, storage rooms, empty rooms. After a while we found a staircase leading up to level B1 (we obviously entered via B2…) where we found the Chalet, a “drink corner” a.k.a. a bar. (Though in daily Japanese life “drink corners” are just vending machines; and not necessarily at a corner.) A dirty, wet bar with parts of the ceiling tiles already on the ground. Why three photos? Because I already had a hunch that this hotel wouldn’t be very photogenic and that I would need every single photo I could get at the end of the day… Around the corner were the shared baths that are so typical for Japanese hotels. Again, nothing special. Yes, rather clean and all the shower heads were still there, but nothing I haven’t seen bigger / better / with more character several times before (and after!).
The main floor with the front desk and the restaurant was one wet, moldy, slippery, smelly nightmare. The kind of places you only spend time at if you run an urbex blog. Standard tables, standard chairs, standard everything. Not a single area with anything special.
What followed were four floors (2F, 3F, 4F, 5F) with a total of 22 guest rooms – some Japanese style with tatami mats and a futon, some Western style with carpet and a bed; some in pretty decent condition, some vandalized, but all equipped with only standard items.
Looking back at the photos of the Toyama Mountain Hotel, it probably wasn’t the worst hotel I’ve ever explored, but it was definitely a contender for the most boring one. Decent standard, but just standard. Everything felt damp and cold, outside were still some patches of snow. The end of a horrible day of explorations. We even returned the car two hours early as we decided to call it a day after this more than underwhelming experience. But, well, that’s urbex. The locations, especially the hotels, can’t be all spectacular – if you want to see some of those, I recommend the *Silent Hill Hotel*, the *Hachijo Royal Hotel*, the *Wakayama Beach Hotel*, and the *Nakagusuku Hotel*. Enjoy!
The demolition of Nara Dreamland has always been something I’ve been worried about ever since I first visited this wonderful place back in 2009 – and now it has begun…
The abandoned Dreamland, an originally barely touched and most recently quite vandalized deserted amusement park in Japan’s former capital Nara, had been a lost place too good to be true for most of its existence – well, except for security, which most likely was in fact the previous owner and his son, who had their offices in the blue City Hall building right next to the entrance and did occasional rides through the park to catch them some trespassers to hand them over to the police. Nobody seems to know exactly the line of ownership, but before the current owner SK Housing and the last operator, the supermarket chain Daiei, there was at least that father and son duo… and probably somebody else as over the years I saw variously labelled signs trying to scare urban explorers away, including LA Investment (エルエーインベストメント) and KK Dreamland (株式会社ドリームランド) – the latter being rather ridiculous as a kabushiki kaisha is a stock company, and I doubt that Nara Dreamland ever had been one.
But this is about the downfall of the abandoned Nara Dreamland and in my estimation that part began about two years ago, when the park was foreclosed and first put up for public auction – since then “security” sightings went down (guess why…), vandalism skyrocketed (guess why…) and everybody and their cousin went there to take selfies with phones smarter than themselves (though I have to admit that I met some nice people, too, especially recently). About a year ago Osaka based real estate company SK Housing bought the lot for 730 million Yen (I reported) and things went from bad to worse – whole groups of people strayed through the park and neither they themselves nor SK Housing apparently gave a damn about anything; young parents with their barely walking toddlers, teens screaming like little children while playing tag, twens grinding stunt bikes on benches and rails, barely walking senior citizens… In spring and summer of 2016 you could actually literally walk into the park without jumping a rope or a fence, or even passing a sign. Seriously, just watch the first video at the end of this article! And then the dormant SK Housing, claiming that they have no plans with Nara Dreamland upon being asked by Japanese friends of mine in late 2015, woke up!
And so it began…
First SK Housing placed a ton of scaffolding on the parking lot at the main entrance, probably in May 2016… and they protected them with two new solid construction fences. Then barely anything happened for another four months, they didn’t even care to close the open gate. How do I know? Because I was alarmed and curious, so I went to Nara Dreamland more often than ever before. Much more often. At first about once a month from May on, from September 3rd till October 23rd every weekend, except for that one in early October, when I caught up with my old friend and occasional co-explorer Hamish – and it was during those two months that things got interesting! VERY interesting…
During my first couple of visits I realized that the amount of stored scaffolding was changing, yet none of it appeared in the park. (What happened to it? I have no idea, they probably took it to another construction site.) So I used the time to document areas of Nara Dreamland I hadn’t been to before, some of them I haven’t even seen anywhere else on the internet. I climbed water slides, had a closer look at the castle, went inside fake Mount Matterhorn, and even found a whole new building nobody seems to know about.
On September 9th SK Housing started to become really active by putting up office containers and porter potties at the lower end of the parking lot, the large construction fence with the main gate. A week later I saw heavy machinery inside the park, yet it was still possible to walk right in – so I took the already mentioned last chance video. When I came back on September 24th, I realized that prep work had begun in the week of September 19th. The previously mentioned office in the City Hall was cleaned out, so were several other buildings of the fake Main Street USA. And while I was taking photos, I got yelled at and shooed away by an older Japanese dude wearing a pink shirt, who was showing the entrance area to a business woman in her early 30s. So I left as they were most likely there on official business… and got right back in after I watched them leaving – staying till it got dark, shooting a video on the way out. A week later I saw that the removal of the plants along the main road had begun and that the gutting of Main Street USA was almost completed. What really shocked me was the fact that they destroyed the iconic Dreamland entrance sign there, without removing the arch-like building though. It turned out that this was my last relaxed exploration of Nara Dreamland as I spent the next weekend catching up with said old friend.
Upon my return on October 15th I was stopped by a French guy just out of sight of Nara Dreamland – he told me that demolition had begun and that he already talked to security and a construction worker; no way inside! It turned out that demolition indeed had begun on the previous Monday, October 10th, a national holiday. And while the prep work was limited to regular work days (Monday to Friday), a crew with heavy machinery was really active on that Saturday, demolishing the Main Street USA (probably because of the national holiday that week?) – most of the vegetation along the road had been completely removed during my absence, too, so everybody could have a good look from the outside at what was happening… At the same time gates were fortified and holes in the fence were fixed. Even old ones that had been there for years! According to large new signs in Japanese AND English, SK Housing had finally taken full control over Nara Dreamland, threatening to sue every unauthorized person caught on the premises. A Japanese only sign also stated that the construction site would be there till December 2017, which sounded like a reasonable schedule to demolish a large amusement park the size of Nara Dreamland. Boy, was I wrong – in more than one way!
So the next weekend I returned on a Sunday, in hope of finding the demolition site unstaffed. I wasn’t that fortunate. Instead pretty much all of Main Street USA was gone – security on scooters guarding both gates, the one on the upper street and the one at the main entrance. In the background you could hear machines smashing the merry-go-rounds to pieces. Not only did the crew work seven days a week, it turned out that they moved much faster than I anticipated. Much, much faster. In the two weeks since October 23rd the demolition crew not only got rid of the massive metal Screw Coaster, they literally tore through the wooden Aska roller coaster. I was expecting that they would dismantle it, probably scaffolding it first. But no, they just ripped through and tore it apart. (In German we fittingly say “Kleinholz machen”, turning it into small pieces of wood / firewood.) Same with the monorail station – and before you ask: No, I have no idea what happened to the monorail train. Probably “Final destination: junkyard!”. If the crew keeps up that speed, there will be little to nothing left of Nara Dreamland by the end of the year – which means that I either misread the sign at the main gate, or SK Housing will finish construction of whatever they are planning to build on the former site of Nara Dreamland. What that will be? I have no idea. When my buddy Hamish made a call just before SK Housing started prep work (in early September), their answer was that they are not talking to anybody about anything. Not photographers, not urban explorers, not the media – not future plans, not schedules, not people involved; not to anybody, not about anything. (Later I heard stories that even NHK was so desperate that they ran up to people and tried to interview them on the street, when they were just leaving the park; before the demolition phase, when it was still possible to explore Nara Dreamland in late September / early October – the NHK people obviously couldn’t enter themselves for legal reasons…)
It ain’t over till the fat gentleman sings…
Believe me, nobody is more devastated about this demolition news than yours truly! I started exploring Nara Dreamland before I began writing this blog; actually before I even considered writing it. Nara Dreamland is amongst the first dozen locations I’ve ever explored, it had been with me my whole urbex career – it’s in the background of my avatar (in the form of Aska). I’ve been one of the first urban explorers to go there… and I’ve been one of the last ones to go there. But just because the world’s most famous abandoned (closed? 😉 ) theme park is currently under demolition doesn’t mean that you’ve seen the last of it! As I mentioned previously in this article: I have tons of material for more blog entries. Material you haven’t seen anywhere else before and now for sure won’t see anywhere else… Even this rather long article feels kind of rushed and contains only a fraction of the photos and videos I took in September and October. So there will be more in-depth updates about the last weeks of Nara Dreamland, about the demolition preperations, about the demolition progress… and about whatever is going to happen on the premises in the future. Abandoned Kansai always has been and always will be your #1 source for all things Nara Dreamland!
(Speaking of which – if you use information from this or any other article on Abandoned Kansai for your own work, please have the decency to link back; thanks a lot!)
Last but not least I would like to use the opportunity to draw attention to a location that did get much less than its share when I first wrote about it a few months ago, so if you have another couple of minutes, please have a look at the ultra rare *Shodoshima Peacock Garden* – you won’t regret it!
In Japan “skylines” often describe scenic toll roads on top of beautiful mountain ridges – a lot of them feature rest stops with restaurants and souvenir shops, some even have a funicular line for people without cars… or had, like in this case.
When you are used to German highways, the world famous Autobahn, Japanese highways are a disgrace and barely tolerable. First of all: They are not even real highways – the majorities of Japanese highways, the National Routes, are country roads at best; most of them even are regular (inner city) streets with no by-pass function whatsoever. If you want to go fast and past inner cities, you have to use the so-called expressways – a nationwide network of roads that look the like Autobahn at first sight, but is not nearly as good; initially built and financed by the State, but later split into three main areas and privatized in 2005. First of all: Unlike the German Autobahn, Japanese expressways are not free. They are toll roads that currently cost 24.6 Yen per kilometer / 39.36 Yen per mile for a regular passenger car! You take a ticket when you drive on and pay, rounded to the nearest 50 Yen, when you get off. It doesn’t sound like that much at first sight, but it adds up – a day trip can easily include 400 to 500 kilometers of driving, which means more than 100 bucks just for highway fees! But that’s not all! While more than half of the Autobahn network only has an advisory speed limit (i.e. you can drive as fast as your car and common sense allows), the speedlimit on Japanese expressways is… 100 km/h. If you are lucky. Even without road works it’s often lowered to 80 km/h. And while an Autobahn has at least two lanes (in each direction, sometimes up to four!), two is the standard in Japan. Sometimes three, but more often one.
Long story short: Japanese highways are not bad, but they are expensive and often mind-numbingly slow – especially when you are trying to return to a big city like Osaka or Tokyo at the end of a long weekend. Bumper to bumper to bumper to…
In addition to “fast” toll roads, you also have “beautiful” toll roads – sometimes they can be used as a short cut (like the Arima Driveway between Kobe and the old onsen town of Arima), sometimes they are their own tourist destination; for example the Ibuki Driveway up Mount Ibuki in northern Shiga prefecture.
The Skyline in Mie was a little bit of both. Kind of a shortcut, though you probably lost quite some time driving up and down the curvy road instead of staying on a flat one, and at the same it offered quite a few viewing points with gorgeous lookouts at both the mountains and the sea. The reason I wanted to have a look up there were a deserted rest stop and an abandoned cable car…
The Mount Asama Cable Car (not related to the also abandoned *Asama Volcano Museum* in Nagano prefecture!) was opened in 1925, but closed in 1944 as a non-essential line, because the Japanese military needed every piece of metal it could get. While the power lines remained, the cable car wasn’t restored / reopened after World War 2 and officially abandoned in 1962. Due to natural decay in the following decades, the upper terminus turned more and more into a deathtrap and therefore was secured with barbed wire (!) and fenced off with a regular black metal fence in 2006. (What’s with Japan and “securing” stuff with barbed wire? I’ve been hiking a lot a few years ago and came across trails that were “secured” with barbed wire, so if you slipped, your fall were at least temporarily stopped… before you bled to death three days later…) Luckily they didn’t combine the fence and the barbed wire, so it was rather easy to have a look at the upper terminus, which was little more than a concrete shell with holes 70 years after it closed for good. But the roof offered a nice view at the area below with the beautiful Mie coast line. A coast line I mistook for another one about 300 kilometers away, when I first tried to locate the cable car four years prior – interestingly enough I found an abandoned gondola station thanks to this mix-up, but that’s a story for another time… What I will remember the most about the Mount Asama Cable Car is the fact how cold it was up there. Since there is no real winter in Osaka (it snows only every other year and never strong enough to stick on the ground for longer than a few hours – in addition to that most buildings are overheated) I am not used to low temperatures anymore – and in combination with the hard wind I was freezing like hardly ever before anywhere in Japan.
The sun was already setting, so we moved on to what once was a rest stop along the skyline – large parking lot, large concrete complex with large windows. While the toilet area and a couple of separate souvenir were still open for business, the main building once housing a large restaurant had been closed, but in decent condition. The combination of toll road, remote location and regular visitors prevented 99% of the possible vandalism the place could have suffered if it wouldn’t have been for those protective factors. And while the view at the cable car was limited in northeastern direction, the rest stop area offered an almost 360° view – absolutely gorgeous!
Overall the The Ruins Of The Skyline were a nice way to end a day trip to the countryside. It took me a while to find the cable car station… and even longer to get there – and there’s always something special to cross an old entry off the list… 🙂
An abandoned school in the mountains of Kyoto hardly anybody of the usual suspects has ever visited before? Count me in!
So far I’ve explored eight abandoned / closed / repurposed schools just in Japan this year, which means that I have to write about a deserted Japanese school about every two months to avoid that they pile up – more often actually, especially since the urbex year is far from being over. The last time I presented a closed school in the land of the Rising Sun was in August. So… ready or not, here comes another one!
The Kyoto Elementary School was located along a tiny road somewhere in the mountains of Kyoto prefecture – not in a town, but between several now abandoned hamlets, similar to the amazing *Shizuoka Countryside School*, which was located on top of a mountain and accessible from at least two valleys. It was closed 25 years ago, 23 years before my visit, and little to nothing is known about it, except for its real name and the fact that it was an elementary school. Walking up to the school I saw an open area and some markings on the wall of the remaining building – signs that at least parts of the school have been demolished. Whether those parts were another building or just a shed with toilets I don’t know, but it seems like the other structure was either just one storey tall or connected by a lower hallway.
A lot of the abandoned schools I’ve visited recently either impressed with tons of items left behind, from musical instruments to taxidermy animals, or they stood out thanks to their unusual looks – decaying wooden structures / swallowed by fog / … The Kyoto Elementary School offered hardly any of that. An announcement speaker here, a record player there. Tatami mats in some of the rooms (which is rather unusual for a school), a couple of organ or pianos. Nothing I hadn’t seen better several times at other places. Even the building itself was rather unspectacular. Maybe 1950s or 60s? At least it was still in good condition, so we didn’t have to worry about crashing through a floor, which is often the case at old wooden schools that haven’t had any maintenance in years. Overall an unspectacular exploration saved by the fact that this was a rather rare school – and that we found an abandoned factory on the way there. But that’s a story for another time… 🙂
There are countless hot springs all over Japan, from Okinawa in the south to Hokkaido in the north. Over the years I’ve been to quite a few abandoned hot spring hotels, but I’ve never actually seen an abandoned hot spring by itself…
We (my exploration buddies Kyoko, Dan, and I) found the Mount Aso Hot Spring by chance while exploring the remains of the *Aso Kanko Hotel* – one of my friends spotted ascending smoke / steam behind some trees and were curious about it. Since it always takes me longer than them to explore and take pictures, they headed out to have a look while I stayed behind to finish up.
It turned out that the source of the steam was a complex arrangement of extremely rusty metal containers and pipes, some of them leaking water – the air filled with a sulphuric stench. So this was the well that once supplied hot spring water to the Aso Tourist Hotel… pipes leading there still fixed to a wall and partly covered by a landslide on the way there. Some nearby ruined buildings furthermore suggested that the well was used to feed one or two onsen with the same water. Since we were short of time on that beautiful, bright spring day, I didn’t have a closer look at the remaining buildings, but they looked rundown, partly collapsed and overall really uninteresting anyway – if you are interested in abandoned onsen, you’ll find more than enough good ones on Abandoned Kansai!
So I focused on taking a couple of quick shots of the convoluted metal structure and a puddle of hot water down the road, always avoiding the haze and it breathtaking stench. Less than half an hour later I was back with my patient friends in the car, heading out to explore what turned out to be the *Trust Hospital*. Personally I loved the Mount Aso Hot Spring, because it was a nice, small, unique location – nothing epic like *Nara Dreamland*, but unexpected and interesting in its own way. This article comes with a small gallery and a rather short video though, but if you stay with me, I promise that I will present some gigantic spectacular locations again soon. There’s a time and a place for everything… 🙂
The Tuberculosis Clinic For Children was one of the first abandoned places I’ve ever been to – and the first I failed at as I wasn’t able to get in… *the first time I went there in 2009*. The *second visit three years later* was much more successful. In 2014 the demolition of the Tuberculosis Clinic For Children began – and I went there just in time for a final exploration.
For many years this abandoned hospital in Kaizuka, just a few kilometers away from Osaka’s Kansai Airport, had been a top secret, remote location only a handful of urban explorers knew about – which is kind of surprising, because even during my second visit the buildings had been in a severely vandalized state. Surrounded by a small forest and next to some fields, the closest inhabited house were a few hundred meters away, so local up to no goods didn’t have to worry too much getting caught when causing some noise. Previously accessible without having to climb over gates or even passing “Do not enter!” signs, the hospital had been turned into a fenced-off construction site during my third visit, and I almost didn’t make it inside. Past the fence, between the two buildings connected by a roofed bridge, there were several construction vehicles – and while demolition hadn’t started yet, preparations were in full swing. After years of abandonment, the area surrounding the hospital was completely overgrown, nature actually started to swallow parts of the building. At that point about a quarter of the jungle like exterior had been removed to make it easier for the demolition crew to do their work. Inside not that much had changed. Quite a bit more vandalism, quite a few items missing – but the boxes with the patient files were still there. Knowing that this would be my last time to explore the Tuberculosis Clinic For Children, I took about two hours to take pictures and another walkthrough video.
Now, another two years later, it seems like the Tuberculosis Clinic For Children has been replaced by a riding hall and an affiliated Italian restaurant called “mori no komichi”, which means “small forest path”; a nice nod to the location of this new business. On the one hand it’s sad to see this unique place gone, on the other it’s comforting to know that a place where children once suffered has been turned into a place that kids can and will enjoy.
The abandoned art deco hotel on Kobe’s Mount Maya is probably the most famous abandoned accommodation in all of Japan; a movie, music videos, and short films have been shot there – and it’s also a popular location for fashion shootings.
By the time *I first explored the Maya Tourist Hotel in 2011* it was already a legend, maybe the most visited abandoned place in all of Japan back then – no urbex blog without an article about this huge, gorgeous art deco hotel built in 1929. If you are interested in the hotel’s varied and fascinating history, I recommend reading the old article first.
Half a year after the exhausting hike halfway up the Rokko Mountain Range in super sweaty summer weather I returned shortly after New Year’s Day on an overcast day at around 0°C. Instead of walking up the mountain, me and my one time exploration partner from Nigeria, Bukola, took the cable car, actually risking not being able to get to the hotel. To not get into the focus of the cable car staff, we only had a quick look at the hotel from above and then continued to the *Mount Maya Bungalow Village*, an often overlooked site just a few minutes away. Upon our return to the cable car station we were able to do what we had to do to get to the hotel…
Exploring the Maya Tourist Hotel for a second time almost felt like being at a new location – different season, different access point, different equipment; the first I had neither a tripod nor a ultra-wide angle lens, so this time I was able to take photos in areas not suitable for the basic equipment I brought the first time. It also meant descending to some creepy areas I missed during my previous time around. Overall a lovely exploration, much less sweaty and nerve-wrecking than in summer – and like at the *Kyoto Dam* the atmosphere was completely different. I absolutely loved the luscious vegetation in summer, but since the area was almost completely overgrown, it made exterior shots rather difficult. The barren trees in winter weren’t exactly jawdroppers, but they allowed some nice views at the stunning front of the building. Despite the fact that there was hardly any interior left, the Maya Tourist Hotel was and is one of the best abandoned hotels in all of Japan – roaming the wide hallways you can basically feel the history of this amazing place. For more information, photos, and videos, *please check out the article I wrote about my first exploration of the Maya Tourist Hotel* – and if you still don’t have enough, you can look forward for more… because I went back… in autumn!
In spring of 2010 I found this cute little abandoned dam / power plant nestled in the mountains of Kyoto prefecture on a Japanese hiking blog – and in summer of 2010, just weeks after the series finale of Lost, I finally had the chance to have a look myself. Except from the heat and the insane humidity it was an awesome experience, because this location looked like a lost Lost set with its massive concrete constructions, the fragile little hut… and some instruments inside still working, getting power from who knew where. My timing was just awesome, everything came together perfectly… 🙂
About half a year later I went back to this amazing abandoned place – again with “awesome” timing: Saturday, March 12 2011. Less than 24 hours prior a devastating earthquake had hit the Japanese Tohoku region, the following tsunami seriously damaged the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, causing only the second Level 7 incident on the International Nuclear Event Scale – thought at that time most likely nobody knew how serious the disaster really was.
To be honest, more than five and a half years later I don’t remember many details of this visit, except that I had a great time and experienced a completely different atmosphere. During my first visit nature was buzzing, water was both on the ground and in the air, the dam was half overgrown and only partly accessible – during my second visit nature was dormant, there was hardly any water on the ground and even less in the air, the atmosphere was extremely peaceful. The Lost atmosphere of the first visit was a bit unnerving, this time I enjoyed more freedom of movement, a better sight, and overall felt more comfortable; though the significantly lower humidity was probably the most important factor. I also took more time to take everything in: The first time I stay about 1.5 hours, this time I stayed 2.5 hours. I actually liked it so much that I came back a week later with a flyjin friend of mine, who had left Kanto to get some distance between himself and the unstable reactor, but only a handful photos of that set made it to this article.
It’s hard to believe that it’s been more than six years since my first visit to the Kyoto Dam – and that it is still a location that barely ever pops up on urbex blogs; because I really love the location. It’s a bit off the beaten tracks, which is why I don’t go there very often, but so far it has always been worth taking the trip…
Now the question is: *summer* or winter? Which one did you like better?
Truly unique abandoned places are really rare – Japan is no exception from that rule. And sometimes the only way to protect those locations is to keep quiet about them… until they got demolished. Welcome to the Shodoshima Peacock Garden!
The Shodoshima Peacock Garden (SPG) was a 30000 square meter park on Shodoshima, the second largest island in the Seto Inland Sea, famous for its vast olive groves. Opened in 1970 on a small elevation in sight of the harbor in Ikeda it was closed on November 30th 2008 according to the Japanese Wikipedia; strangely enough I found a calendar from October 2009, but who knows who put it there… The SPG featured 3500 peafowls in its heyday during the early 70s, when up to half a million visitors per year were welcomed – a massive achievement, considering that Shodoshima is not connected to any other island by bridge; but due to its size, a motorized vehicle is kind of necessary, so you either need a rental or arrive by a car ferry with your own set of wheels. (Or you bite the bullet, like yours truly, and depend on the few public busses that make it around the island… but not all the way.)
Anyway, the years of plenty didn’t even reach the count of seven as visitor numbers plummeted quickly – by the mid-70s they were already as low as 150000 per year. The hatch rate of the peacocks also took a dive, which was the main reason why the number of peafowls in the park went down to 500 by 2002, when the park closed for one year for maintenance. In 2003 the Shodoshima Peacock Garden opened from April to November, but got rid of a main attraction that was quite popular before the break: 40 peacocks walked up a ramp inside Mount Peacock and then flew the 10 meters down into the park to the excited visitors – but despite 5 meter high nets and peacocks not being good flyers, every once in a while one them escaped, which was probably the main reason why the so-called Flight Show was cancelled; it turned out that the flight show was too much of a flight risk. By 2007 the number of peacocks went up again to 1000, but the number of visitors went down to a mere 50000 for the whole season; not nearly enough to cover the costs, and so the Shodoshima Bus Company, who owned the SPG, decided to close the park for good – especially since the aging facilities would have required additional investments soon. When the park finally closed in 2008, the remaining 200 peacocks were sold to other animal parks, including Shodoshima’s own Choshikei Monkey Park.
I first found out about the Shodoshima Peacock Garden from my German friend Chris a little more than four years ago. He was visiting Japan and traveled around a bit with his girlfriend, before we met at a Torikizoku in Osaka. We talked about this and that, when he mentioned that strange abandoned park he found on Shodoshima… with some taxidermy peacocks in a souvenir shop. I had never heard of that place before and was terribly intrigued… So I went there in September of 2012 with my friend Chris from New Zealand. First we (re)visited the *Shikoku New Zealand Village* and an abandoned transformer station, the next morning we took the ferry from Takamatsu to Ikeda. Approaching the harbor, we could already see the Shodoshima Peacock Garden on an elevation right at the coast. 20 minutes later we stood at the park’s entrance – filled with pure excitement upon entering a place we knew hardly anything about and had never seen pictures of before. This was exploration in its purest form. Don’t tell me that people going to *Nara Dreamland* these days are exploring it! At best they are looking for spots to recreate well-known photos they’ve seen countless times on the internet. But Chris and I, standing there, ready to go in, that was pure exploration spirit!
The entrance building featured a small shop and a ticket booth to the left as well as restrooms to the right – a net stretching above the building in an attempt to prohibit peafowls from fleeing the premises. The net actually surrounded the whole park, followed by a line or two of thick vegetation, predominantly massive palm trees. The former garden was mostly overgrown, but after about 100 meters there was the souvenir shop German Chris mentioned… and to the left was the entrance to Birdpia, basically the main attraction of the park, featuring huge outdoor bird cages as well as a building with a panoramic round aquarium and an egg exhibition. The exit of the building was locked, but it once lead to the monument near the coast line, the area Kiwi Chris and I saw from the ferry – from there you got to the gift shop and then to the exit. The outdoor area mostly overgrown and the indoor area mostly dark, this turned out to be one of the creepiest explorations ever – mostly because I had no idea what to expect. Once you’ve seen photos of a location somewhere, it gives you a certain amount of confidence and reassurance, because every once in a while you recognize things and places you’ve seen before; it’s comforting. Never knowing what’s behind the next corner is friggin nerve-wrecking, especially at an eerie place like that! At the same time it’s super exciting, because you are not walking on beaten paths and you don’t take the same pictures as dozens or hundreds of people before you.
The souvenir shop / restaurant was built above a slope and therefor a bit scary in its own way, despite being really well-lit for most of it. The restaurant featured a great view at the Seto Inland Sea, while the souvenir shop offered a wide variety of olive chocolate products. No kidding! Olive chocolate products! As I mentioned before, Shodoshima is famous for olives. But instead of selling canned olives and olive oil, people decided it would be a good idea to sell olive chocolate, olive chocolate cake and olive chocolate cookies. Since the shop was in overall good condition I kept taking pictures of the fake sample boxes… and since these sweets were so original, I think those photos deserve to be published. At least half of them or so… The rest of the building was far less interesting – a kitchen, some dirty toilets and a storage room on the lower floor. Outside again I took some pictures of Mount Peacock, the monument at the waterfront and of the park in general. It was then when I found a cage construction leading down a slope in the back. I followed it and finally reached the empty and cleaned out peacock stable – and from there I got to the internal ramp leading up Mount Peacock, after passing some really spooky concrete areas. Maybe the last photo of the set gives you a general idea…
When I originally planned the day on Shodoshima, I slated about two hours to explore the Shodoshima Peacock Garden. Because, let’s be honest: How exciting can an abandoned bird park be? Well, apparently very exciting, because Chris and I finally got out of there after about five hours! Which left me pretty much enough time to take a bus to Tonosho, say goodbye to Chris (who was continuing to Okayama), take another bus to Fukuda, and catch a ferry to Himeji – beautiful sunset on the water, a perfect ending for an amazing day.
Now, back home I was a bit of in a predicament. On the one hand I wanted to tell everyone about this amazing exploration I enjoyed so much, but that would have meant to reveal information about the location – and I was worried that the increasing vandalism hurting *Nara Dreamland* could also damage this nearly pristine location. Just the information that the SPG once was a peafowl park (without mentioning the real name or location) would have allowed people with minimal Google skills to get on its track, because there have not been many facilities similar to the Shodoshima Peacock Garden, let alone closed / abandoned ones. A fellow explorer once said that he has no problems revealing real names even of locations in fantastic condition as he is not in the business of protecting abandoned places – which I guess is true, but I am also not in the business of exposing abandoned places. And so I kept quiet, always hoping to come back one day – but I never made it, because new explorations always seemed to be more interesting. Last week Monday, when preparing the Nara Dreamland article, I was revisiting some abandoned places via the satellite view of GoogleMaps… and saw that the souvenir building has received some TLC while Mount Peacock and all other constructions (except for the monument) have been leveled. On the one hand I was terribly sad to see another abandoned place gone, especially a truly unique and amazing one like this, on the other hand I was as full of joy as I have been four years ago standing at the entrance of the Shodoshima Peacock Garden – because I knew I could finally write about it without holding back. And now I hope that you will enjoy looking at the photos and watching the videos as much as I enjoyed exploring this wonderful, wonderful place you’ll probably never see anywhere again…
To the day 10 years ago Nara Dreamland closed forever without a single ride being removed. Since then it has become one of the most (in)famous abandoned amusement parks in the world, attracting both urban explorers and vandals from within Japan as well as overseas. Let’s have another look… 🙂
The first time I visited Nara Dreamland was back in 2009, when hardly anybody knew about this strange Disneyland clone – and of course *I almost got caught while exploring the ice skate rental / conference / accommodation building*. The next time I went there, in 2010, I actually got caught by “security”, in hindsight probably the then-owner or his son. While other people reportedly were slammed with a fine or even handed over to the police, I was lucky… because when I realized that I was facing the same fate, I was able to run away.
Since then I’ve been to Nara Dreamland at least once a year – sometimes inside, sometimes just at the rather safe entrance with the huge parking lot and the two mystery buildings. Sunshine, rain, even *snow*. Morning, afternoon, night – pretty much every hour of the day, except maybe 9 p.m. till midnight. I went there alone, with friends, with friends of friends, with strangers. At Nara Dreamland I had some of the best urbex times, but also some of the worst urbex times.
Sadly Nara Dreamland turned out to be the place where I was able to witness how vandalism literally and figuratively ruined a once amazing location… and that process is actually still continuing, probably faster than ever. “Boys go to Disneyland, Men go to Dreamland” – with ridiculous, snappy phrases like that some people publish their Nara Dreamland photos. But the sad truth is: tourists and vandals go to Dreamland, men have been there 5, 6, 7 years ago.
When I first arrived at Nara Dreamland, the entrance was completely unharmed, the pay booth locked. Now the sign is smashed, the kiosk broken open and in shambles.
When I first arrived at Nara Dreamland, there were no graffiti anywhere – at least I don’t remember seeing any. Now half of the park is tagged – including one of the parking lot buildings, the entrance to the Main Street USA clone… and of course the castle. Yes, even the castle!
When I first took a video of the monorail in 2011, it showed some early signs of vandalism – now it is completely covered in spray paint, with a sticker on top: FC St. Pauli, 7. Herren. Soccer fans and vandalism? What a shocking combination… Although that badge doesn’t really make any difference considering the insane amount of damage in total, it kind of hit close to my heart as those vandalizing mofos were not only foreigners, they were (most likely) Germans – so let me address them in a way they hopefully will understand, despite having underdeveloped birdbrains: Ich hoffe, dass euer beschissener Drecksverein auf Nimmerwiedersehen in der Versenkung verschwindet!
What else is there to say? To be honest, I feel a bit tired now. Being reminded of how much Nara Dreamland suffered in the past couple of years really makes me sad (and I am not used to curse in German anymore…). NDL was such a wonderful place in 2009/2010, now it’s just a shadow of its old glory. Unfortunately there is no way to keep a place like that a secret. It’s too big, it’s too well-known amongst the Japanese population and theme park fans worldwide. 95% of the photos taken there are very recognizable; because of the wooden rollercoaster Aska, because of the Screw Coaster, because of the general cheap Disney clone atmosphere. Luckily that doesn’t apply for all abandoned places in Japan – so next week I will present you a truly unique location you’ve most likely never seen anywhere else before, even if you are into Japanese urbex as much as I am! Until then I hope you’ll enjoy some more photos I’ve taken at *Nara Dreamland* over the course of almost seven years (if you have an eye for details, you’ll find the same motorbike on several photos; needless to say that I never even touched it…) – most of them unpublished before, the rest to illustrate the soaring amount of vandalism at this once pristine abandoned theme park…
Abandoned Kansai 