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Archive for the ‘Hotel / Ryokan’ Category

Tsuyama Plaza Hotel

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Haikyo, Hotel / Ryokan, Hyogo, Japan, Photography, Travel, Urbex, Video, Visited in 2012 on 2015/12/29| 7 Comments »

I am getting a bit tired of hearing stuff like “Oh, there is no vandalism in Japan!” and “Japanese people are so much more respectful towards things that don’t belong to them… and nature!” – yeah, you might get that impression if you’ve never been to Japan or never left a bigger city here, but overall those almost quotes are highly exaggerated in my experience. So now I finally post a location I should have posted years ago… the Tsuyama Plaza Hotel.

Before I get to this vandalized rundown piece of sh…ub-dee-doo, let me say a few words about vandalism in Japan… and why the problem is a bit more complex than “Because it’s Japan”!
Yes, I am aware that the average place presented on Abandoned Kansai probably is indeed in better condition than the average place presented on a weekly blog about urbex in Europe or the States. One of the main reasons probably is that I am holding back locations like the Tsuyama Plaza Hotel, because I rather show you more interesting places. And when I go to rundown, vandalized buildings, I still try to take interesting photos, presenting even those locations in the best possible way. “But most urbex blogs do that!”, you might say, and you have a valid point there. Which bring us to an urbex related reason why there is less vandalism / damage to abandoned places in Japan: There are a lot less urban explorers in Japan than Europe and the States! I know, urbexers don’t damage, don’t steal, and don’t reveal places – in theory… But every visit, even when executed as carefully as possible, contributes to the downfall of a place – you bring in dirt and humidity, some people move items when looking for hints about a location’s history or to create more interesting photos… and when those are published, they attract more people to those locations, not all of which are (serious) urbexers. Speaking of attracting more people – geocaching is not a thing in Japan; not at all! I know, I know, geocachers treat every place with the highest respect and would never damage anything… in theory. But they actively lure people to deserted places by publishing coordinates. Just google “lost places geocaching” and I am sure you’ll find tons of abandoned places in the German speaking parts of Europe, despite none of those search words are German. And please don’t get me wrong, this is not an attack against geocachers – they have the same right to be at abandoned places as urbexers (technically: none…), though I’ve never heard of a place being torn down due to too many careful, serious photographers, while I was given the “too many” reason about geocachers by the demolition crew tearing down the *Deportation Prison Birkhausen*. Long story short: a lot less urbexers, hardly any geocachers in Japan. But in my estimation a lot more abandoned places per square kilometer. Japan is a country with very densely populated and rather remote areas and a distinct “out of sight, out of mind” mentality – outside of city centers, places are rather abandoned than demolished, especially since there is (was?) a tax break for built-up land, which means abandonment not only avoids demolition costs, but also taxes in the years to come.
Which brings us to “the Japanese people” – and as much as I hate those generalizations, I guess they are kind of necessary in this case. First of all: the average Japanese person is a lot more superstitious than the average European person. It’s actually mind-blowing how many of them believe in ghosts and stuff like that – which probably can be explained by the indigenous Shinto religion and its relationship with spirits and purification in general; abandoned places, especially those where people died, are absolute no-go zones for those people. In addition to that, Japanese people are a lot more subservient to authority than most Americans and Europeans, at least in my experience. They tend to follow orders by higher ranking people without questioning them, kind of in a Prussian way. Do you remember that Simpsons episode in season 20 where Lisa is standing in front of the Springfield Bell Tower with a sign stating “Keep out”? Below is another sign: “Or enter. I’m a sign, not a cop.“ Well, in Japan a sign, a rope or even a traffic cone usually is enough to keep people from entering places thanks to that general obedience. I’ve been to abandoned places with Japanese people and they didn’t dare to pass a sign or step over a rope – which is nothing in comparison to what urbexers all over the world do to get past barb-wired fences or avoid security to take pictures of places they consider “abandoned”. (But if somebody pays for security, is that place really abandoned? Or just currently not used to its full potential?) Which brings us to another major character difference – Japanese society is still about (large) groups, while urbex tends to be a rather individual hobby; especially when you are interested in taking photos. In my experience, Japanese people love big groups. 15, 20, 30, 40 people. But that doesn’t work for urbex. Even 5 people can be too many for some locations, especially if the place is small and / or access is a bit more complicated. Big groups also support another thing Japan is great at – social control and public shaming. Even in a group of 15 people there is always a snitch happy to rat out the rest… All of that combined explains why there are a lot less urban explorers / geocachers / individualistic people in Japan.
As for vandalism in general… in my opinion / experience it’s quickly on the rise in Japan. Sure, there is not nearly as much graffiti and pointless destruction in Japan as in Europe or the States, but there is infinitely more in comparison to when I first came to Japan almost 20 years ago. And when there is the opportunity, there is lots of vandalism in Japan, too. Just look at the *Rape and Death of an Abandoned Japanese Sex Museum* article I wrote a few months ago. That place went from awesome to completely vandalized in less than two years. Why? Because it was located on the main road in a busy spa town just south of Sapporo and somebody marked it on GoogleMaps. Plenty of bored people of all ages after dark – 4.45 p.m. in winter, 7.30 p.m. in summer. The *Tuberculosis Clinic for Children* in the south of Osaka went from “completely locked with running machines inside” to “completely trashed” in less than three years. Why? Opportunity! The clinic was out of sight and out of hearing from any neighbors, yet still in walking distance of a train station. If you went there at any time of the day, even with the intent to smash windows and furniture, chances were close to zero that anybody would have heard you. And those are just two examples for trashed places (both have been demolished in early 2015). And sometimes they literally get trashed. With trash. Because getting rid of electronics can be expensive in Japan, a lot of people just dump their old TVs, fridges and other equipment somewhere in the woods or at abandoned places – so much for the nature loving population mentioned in the intro… (I once took a very special photo in the middle of nowhere – a sign stating in many words “Don’t unload your garbage here!”… and in the background a huge pile of garbage bags and electronics…)
I’m not trying to be “anti” here, I just wanted to share my experiences / observations of living in Japan for almost 10 years. Maybe I am wrong and there really is significantly less vandalism in Japan. Who knows? But if there is, I am pretty sure the explanation is much more complex than “because it’s Japan”.

Now, let’s finally get to the Tsuyama Plaza Hotel… and get it over with. According to the calendars on the walls, the hotel closed in June of 2000 – and neither time nor people have been nice to the building ever since. It was (and probably still is) basically a prime example for a large, boring vandalized hotel with nothing special about it. Graffiti everywhere, broken glass everywhere, interior and everything not screwed or bolted lying around everywhere… and even some of the screwed stuff got screwed. Heck, I don’t have anything nice to say about the place either, except that the view from the lounge on the top floor was rather nice during sunset; but that’s something not even the most violent vandal would be able to destroy. I was bored exploring the place and I am kind of bored writing this part of the article. So I’ll stop – please enjoy the photos and the video. I’m outta here! 🙂

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Silent Hill Hotel

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Haikyo, Hotel / Ryokan, Japan, Kansai, Nara, Photography, Travel, Urbex, Video, Visited in 2015 on 2015/09/08| 7 Comments »

A quiet mountain ridge. A rather new looking, but closed hotel. Fog creeping in from every direction – and all of a sudden an unexplained noise…

When I started taking photos at abandoned places six years ago, I went all by myself on sunny weekend days, using public transportation. Then I started to involve friends, recently we rent a car – that required more planning and allowed for less flexibility, yet most of the time we were lucky with the weather.
This wasn’t the case on a weekend in June… and not really a surprise, given that it was the middle of rainy season. And boy did it rain! Sometimes it only drizzled, there were even short breaks without any precipitation, but overall it was a pretty rainy weekend; especially in the mountains. After a few hours of driving, Ruth, Chelsey and I finally reached the mountain ridge we were looking for, welcomed by light drizzle. We parked the car next to a small shrine and headed over to some run-down abandoned buildings so moldy that we left after checking out the lobby. Time started to be of the essence as it was afternoon already, so we headed over to the rather new looking building – a closed hotel according to a Japanese travel blog, inside condition unknown as the guy didn’t dare to enter. At this time the drizzle stopped and fog started to creep up the steep mountain slopes. Surprisingly quickly we found an unlocked door to an untidy office room that looked like somebody stayed there for a while. At this point everybody’s general uneasiness went from “Should we really enter?” to “We probably shouldn’t have entered…”, yet we all tried to play it pretty cool.
On the ground floor of the Silent Hill Hotel (obviously a fake name, I could have called it Abandoned Hotel In The Fog or Eerie Fog Hotel, but it really reminded me of the famous video games series, especially in hindsight) we found the lobby, tatami party rooms, shared baths for men and women, a pretty messy kitchen and several offices / dorm rooms, probably for employees. On the upper floors were the guest rooms, western style with beds. Since the hotel offered little to nothing I hadn’t seen several times before, I rather rushed taking photos, much to the delight of my female companions. When it started to rain again and the fog almost swallowed the hotel, Chelsey and Ruth decided they had enough and returned to the car. I stayed behind on an upper floor since I wanted to take a couple more photos and the video tour – but I heard them leave and saw them outside. About five minutes later I heard a noise coming from the ground floor. Not a window closing in the wind or something. More like the door opening and closing again, definitely something rather heavy snapping shut. I assumed the girls came back, so I continued taking photos, kind of expecting them upstairs any second – but they didn’t show up. When I was done I decided not to wait any longer and get the heck out of this eerie building, so I started the video walkthrough… which turned out to be an unnerving experience, because not only did I go to the known areas I was already uneasy about, stupid me headed over to the back, the dark area, where the kitchen was – a part of the hotel the girls had seen, but not me as I was too busy taking photos; walking through the hotel all alone felt extremely weird, as if something was lurking in the darkness. Leaving an abandoned place with a camera full of good photos is always the best moment of an exploration to me, no matter how easy it was or well it went – but never was I happier than when I left the Silent Hill Hotel!

After returning to Osaka the next evening, Chelsey, Ruth and I had dinner at a local restaurant, recalling the weekend – and we agreed that the Silent Hill Hotel was by far the creepiest place we ever visited. Ruth said that she almost grabbed a crowbar lying on the reception desk shortly after we entered. I mentioned the second noise coming from the ground floor and asked if they returned to the hotel for a while – they said no, but confirmed that they had the same unwell feeling that something or somebody was lurking in the dark. If you don’t understand what I mean, watch the video at the end of the article, especially the second half. I only watched bits and pieces again to make sure that the quality was at least somewhat presentable – that’s all I was able to stomach. Even my solo exploration of an *abandoned mental hospital near Tokyo* wasn’t nearly as nerve-wrecking as this harmless looking hotel in a very scenic area of the Nara mountains… on a sunny day.

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The Ruins Of Mount Atago – A Very Special Kyoto Hike

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Haikyo, Hotel / Ryokan, Japan, Kansai, Photography, Ski, Travel, Urbex, Video, Visited in 2010 on 2015/06/02| 9 Comments »

“Japan has four seasons, you must know, which is unique!”
Without warning you just got hit over the head with an example of nihonjinron, “theories about the Japanese” – a conglomerate of BS rooted so deeply in Japanese society that most people in the land of the rising sun don’t even realize how stupid the majority of those theories are… and yet they are a popular conversation topic; especially when somebody tries to impress you with how unique Japan is. Not only are there plenty of other countries with four seasons, Japan stretches across several climate zones from the Kuril Islands to close to Taiwan, and therefore the weather differs drastically depending on where in Japan you reside. In my personal experience, living for more than eight years in Kansai, Japan has only two seasons – “nightmarish hot and humid” and “kind of bearable”. The beginning and the end of “kind of bearable” are marked by two periods of about 15 days each, which are really lovely… other countries would call them spring and autumn, but in my book those phases are way too short to be called seasons! (Hey, the Japanese have nihonjinron and I have my own set of theories about this country!)
Anyway, for about one month per year it’s actually really nice outside – then the sun feels like a warm hug instead of a laser beam trying to kill you, and people are having lots of BBQs. Those four to five weeks are also the best time to hike… and one of my favorite hikes is up Mount Atago in the outskirts of Kyoto.

Mount Atago Cable Car Revisited
Before I picked up urban exploration as a hobby, I enjoyed hiking a lot – and so it was no surprise that my first exploration ever in November of 2009 was the *Mount Atago Cable Car*, basically combining *haikyo* and hiking. Almost a year later, in October 2010, I went back as I really wanted to see the cable car station in full green, also taking advantage of the beautiful weather during that time. Walking along the abandoned track was still tiring, but the steep climb around the collapsed tunnel #5 was a lot easier then, because somebody strained new ropes. On my third visit in total I took some time to have a closer look at some of the bridges leading up the mountain, and I have to say that they were in pretty bad shape after almost 70 years of abandonment. I got that feeling walking along the uneven and sometimes dangerously eroded track, but having a look from below didn’t exactly make me feel more comfortable. One of the bridges had already collapsed in parts and I guess more damage by natural decay follow since then – especially at those parts not protected by trees and therefore at the mercy of wind, rain and snow.
The still existing cable car station at the top didn’t change a lot in those 11 months, although the weather (and maybe some people who couldn’t leave their hands off the concrete pillars) contributed to the progressing decay there. This time I shot most of the station with my ultra-wide angle lens I didn’t have last time, which allowed me to explore the place with a different set of eyes.
Going to the Mount Atago Cable Car again wasn’t spectacular, but I didn’t expect it to be any other way – it was a nice autumn hike with some wonderful views and a trip down memory lane, a perfect way to start a day at Mount Atago.

Mount Atago Hotel Revisited
What a surprise: The ruins of the *Mount Atago Hotel* were still just a stone’s throw away from the Mount Atago Cable Car – and again nothing had changed, except for the lens on my camera. The mosaic at the entrance seemed to be a bit more loose than during my first visit… and the pile of broken dishes in the back was more spread out, partly covered by freshly cut trees. Woodworkers in action, I guess…

Ryokan Mizuguchi
At first I wondered if I should write about the Ryokan Mizuguchi at all, as there was little to nothing of it left – but then I came up with this 4 in 1 idea, and now I am really happy that I took some photos back in 2010. While the Mount Atago Hotel and the Mount Atago Cable Car are all over the internet, barely anybody bothers with this couple of concrete walls a few hundred meters away from the hotel, towards the famous Mount Atago Shrine. I saw the remains last time I went up the mountain, but since I was tired and running out of time then, I didn’t have a closer look. During this visit I was more relaxed and took a few rather vacuous pictures… until I found a bottle that caught my eyes. What really intrigued me about it was the fact that it had a metal cap that looked like it was never off. An old unopened bottle at the top of a mountain isn’t something you find every day! If it ever had a label, of course it was long gone, but on the lower end of the bottle the glass had some kanji – later I found out that the company (日本麦酒鉱泉株式会社 – something like “Japanese Beer Mineral Spring Company”) only existed from 1922 till 1933, before becoming part of Mitsuya Foods – nowadays famous in Japan under the name Asahi and for brands like Mitsuya Cider, Bireley and Wonda (coffee). Since the hotel and the cable car both opened in 1929, it’s rather likely that this water hole went into business around the same time, which means that the bottle I had in my hands was up there for about 80 years, manufactured at a time when my grandmother went to elementary school or middle school.
The few Japanese pages on the internet covering the Mizuguchi Ryokan speculate that the place must have been made of wood with only the cellar being cast of cement. There are no pictures, no blueprints and hardly any information in general, and therefore I can only assume that the place closed down together with the hotel and the cable car in 1944. So while the pictures still might not be that spectacular, it was just an awesome feeling to hold that bottle in my hand – and I hope somebody will have a similar experience when the bottle is 90 or 100 years old…

Mount Atago Ski Resort
The fourth and final stop of my haikyo hiking at Mount Atago was the Mount Atago Ski Resort; one of the reasons the hotel and the cable car were built in the first place. Located about 45 minutes away from the hotel, the Mount Atago Ski Resort would be almost impossible to find nowadays, if it wasn’t for a few signs that were put up in 2006 and that direct hikers to the middle of nowhere – although I doubt many people will walk 190 meters up an earth wall and along an overgrown plain. While the area with its gentle slopes looked perfectly suited for a ski area targeting beginners, there were barely any hints left that the place once was populated by hundreds of sport freaks. You really have to explore thoroughly to find signs like red plastic posts, concrete sockets, scattered china and even some solid ramune glass bottles (ramune is a Japanese lemonade – the opening gets blocked by a marble when you drink, making it extremely popular amongst kids). Construction of the ski resort began in 1928 and like the hotel and the cable car, it opened in 1929 and closed in 1944, when the latter was demolished for scrap in a last futile attempt to support Japan’s war efforts.
On my way back to the Mount Atago Shrine I found some collapsed shacks and a Komatsu D205 bulldozer, though I can’t say for sure if they were in any way related to the ski resort.

The Ruins Of Mount Atago might not be the most spectacular ones in Japan, but if you enjoy hiking and are interested in (pre-)WW2 history, this is the place to visit in Kansai on a sunny spring or autumn day. You probably won’t get an adrenalin kick (unless you get lost bypassing the two collapsed tunnels of the cable car track), but you’ll return from the mountain with a deep comforting feeling of accomplishment. (Oh, and don’t be as stupid as I was – bring at least one friend, because the cable car part of the hike really is quite dangerous!)

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Aso Kanko Hotel

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Hotel / Ryokan, Japan, Kumamoto, Kyushu, Photography, Travel, Video, Visited in 2015 on 2015/05/26| 14 Comments »

The Aso Kanko Hotel (Aso Sightseeing Hotel) has been an urbex legend for many, many years. Japanese bloggers were excited about its size, its beauty, its famous former guests – and after the abandonment: its security and its function as a movie set. They came up with abbreviated or even fake names to keep it a secret, but of course sooner or later somebody spilled the beans… without mentioning some essential information!

When Kyoko, Dan and I arrived at the Aso Kanko Hotel on a warm spring afternoon, we were in need of a successful exploration. Earlier that day we wanted to explore abandoned onsen hotel with an amazing water park, only to find the demolition crew wrapping up their work – the onsen hotel was gone, but the heavy machinery was still there… Next on the list was the *Bungomori Railyard*, and you know what happened to that one! So after another 90 minutes in the car we finally arrived in the Aso area, famous for its active volcano(s). The road leading up to the Aso Kanko Hotel was in good, but not perfect condition, and soon the distinctive roof was appearing between the treetops. Everything was going according to plan…
… but then the hotel turned out to be not nearly as big as I expected it to be. Not small, but mid-size at best. Long, but narrow; only three storeys tall. And it was vandalized! Not just slightly, but pretty much beyond repair. They shot a movie here? Really? Even though that was ten years prior to our visit, the hotel was in really bad condition. Well, average abandoned hotel condition, the kind I really loathe to explore by now. But given that the first two destinations were total duds, this wasn’t too bad… We quickly scouted the surroundings and found another small, but extremely rundown house plus a couple of rusty shacks, so we headed back to the main building. As you can see in the videos and on the photos, most of the windows and doors were smashed, the whole thing was just wet and rotting and moldy. I am sure both the outdoor and indoor baths for men and women were gorgeous 30 or 40 years ago, but now they were just part of this depressing sight. The rooms were pretty much standard, just some kind of bar next to a huge terrace showed original 70s style. Overall a rather disappointing exploration, but the background story of the hotel is actually quite interesting.

The Aso Kanko Hotel was opened in July of 1939, built with government funds. It made quite a splash those days as it was designed to be a Western style hotel with several features very unusual in Japan at that time, like a revolving door, flushing toilets, a Western style bath and a big dining room with a bar. After World War 2 ended, the Aso Kanko Hotel, much like the gorgeous *Maya Tourist Hotel in Kobe*, was used by the American forces for rest and recuperation – to make the stay even more comfortable for the exhausted soldiers, some billiard tables, a golf course and a trapshooting facility were added.

When the American military occupiers left, the Aso Kanko Hotel was taken over and renovated by a predecessor company of today’s Kyushu Industrial Transportation Holdings Co., Ltd. – a move that lured one of the most controversial people in Japanese history to visit the hotel: Emperor Hirohito.
The elder amongst us might remember the Showa Tenno as an older, tiny man with a friendly attitude towards everything but the Yasukuni Shrine… an image bestowed on him by both the American occupational forces as well as the Japanese Imperial Palace. Yet much like the image we have about the samurai, our impression of Hirohito is mostly wrong – he might have underwent a Damascene conversion after the end of WW2, but up till that point he was responsible for one of the most costly war of aggression in human history, and was only spared being tried as a war criminal due to the forceful powers previously mentioned; especially McArthur, who saved countless high ranking Japanese war criminals for political reasons, including surgeon general Ishii Shiro, one of the worst human beings in history. But don’t let propaganda fool you, Hirohito was actively involved in Japan’s wars during the 1930s and 1940s, even authorizing the production (on *Okunoshima*, now known as Rabbit Island) and use of chemical weapons – unique during WW2! And he at least knew about and condoned the horrors his military spread over Southeast Asia, including the vivisections on humans conducted by Unit 731. Oh, also I am sure you’ve heard stories that many Japanese rather committed suicide than being taken prisoner towards the end of the war – that was based on Imperial orders to civilians (!), released by Hirohito from as early as June 1944 on! Please keep that in mind and stop contributing to the myth that Japan was one of the main victims of WW2… especially later this year at the 70th anniversary of the end of the Pacific War. (Sorry for getting distracted, but Japan’s unwillingness to take responsibility for its actions from the Meiji era till 1945, especially for the last 13 years, makes me sick to the stomach every time the topic comes up. 70 years of history-falsification are enough!)
Okay, so it was back in 1957 when “I honestly had no idea what was going on during my reign…”-san visited the Aso Kanko Hotel with his family… and apparently he liked it so much that he came back twice in the following years, making the hotel one of the most famous ones in all of Japan.
Sadly that didn’t prevent the resort from disastrous events. On July 9th 1964 for example, 3500 square meters of the hotel, including the lobby, went up in flames. Nobody got killed, but an exhibition of paintings by Ebihara Kinosuke became a victim of the fire. Renovations took a whole year, but afterwards the complex of three main buildings and several annexes continued to thrive and quickly became the most popular summer retreat in all of Kumamoto. Three main buildings? Yes, three. It seems like back in the heydays the Aso Kanko Hotel was a much bigger resort than it is a ruin now. Nobody seems to have documented what happened exactly, but as the complex grew older, it became less popular. In December of 1999 it was decided that the AKH would be closed in February 2000… and so it happened. After five years of (undocumented) abandonment, director Shimizu Takashi (inventor of the Ju-on / The Grudge movie series) shot most of his Japanese flick Reincarnation on location. Back then the complex must have been still intact as you can see much more of the Ono Kanko Hotel (as it was called in the movie) than on any urbex photo of the Aso Kanko Hotel. The oldest photos I’ve seen of the abandoned AKH were from 2007 and showed the hotel pretty much in the same state as it is now, so I assume most of the other buildings were demolished shortly after the movie shot wrapped up.
That explains why the Aso Kanko Hotel was much smaller than I expected upon arrival. It also leaves us with the question why Japanese explorers glorified the place so much that they left out the fact that 70 to 80% of the hotel already had been demolished upon their arrival. But then again, if there is one thing you should have taken from this article, it’s that Japan has a long history of idealizing history…

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Jingoro Hotel

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Haikyo, Hotel / Ryokan, Japan, Photography, Travel, Urbex, Video, Visited in 2011 on 2015/04/14| 6 Comments »

Abandoned accommodations are the biggest group of deserted places in Japan. Hotels, love hotels, ryokan, youth hostels. There must be hundreds of them all over the country – some of them are absolutely amazing, others are the worst moldy, vandalized dumps you can imagine. My first indoor abandoned place I ever explored was a hotel, the *One Dragon Hotel* in the south of Osaka – one of those vandalized dumps, but I didn’t care, because when you start urban exploration, EVERY place is super exciting. After a while though all of them start to look the same, and it takes exceptional examples like the *Hachijo Royal Hotel* or the *Wakayama Beach Hotel* (still only on Abandoned Kansai!) to remind you that some of them are actually pretty amazing. Back in 2011 though I couldn’t even imagine that world-class places like that existed in Japan!
At that point in time, less than two years after I picked up urban exploration as a hobby, I was tired of deserted accommodations… and standing in the backyard parking lot of the Jingoro Hotel, contemplating whether or not I should enter the rather big hotel all by myself after I already crossed two other places off my list that day. On the one hand I was tired, it was afternoon already, and I had to go inside without company – on the other hand: it was right in front of me… and there were some arcade machines in the lobby. Back then I had barely ever seen abandoned arcade machines, so I was really curious. I walked down the staircase to the semi-basement ground floor, the door to the kitchen open wide enough for me to get inside. And I instantly regretted that move as the typical “abandoned Japanese hotel smell” hit me. It’s hard to describe, but if you ever smelled it, you won’t forget it. This very special mix of rotting tatami and moldy wallpaper… Nothing that makes you wanna puke, but it smells nasty and you know that you don’t want to be exposed to it for hours… or even minutes. Since I was already inside the hotel, I had a look around and hoped that the smell wouldn’t be that bad throughout the whole exploration.
As three and a half years have passed since I last saw the Jingoro Hotel, my memories of that exploration are rather fragmented. I remember that it was a nightmare to take photos of the arcade machines in the lobby (Namco’s Final Lap and Jaleco’s Gran Prix Star) as everybody passing by outside was able to look inside through the huge windows, basically ground to ceiling. I also remember that parts of that floor suffered severely from arson (adding a whole new layer to the smell, lucky me!) while other parts looked like on the day the hotel was closed. On the upper floors the hallways and rooms were littered with airgun pellets, but the biggest surprise to me were the amazing shared baths, of course gender separated – back then I hadn’t seen anything like that, especially since both bathing areas featured outdoor bathtubs offering stunning views at the mountain and sea surrounding.
Back down on the main floor though I almost suffered a heart attack. I was hiding from a group of Japanese who were taking a photo outside of the hotel with the beautiful landscape as the background, all facing the hotel except for the photographer. The process took a while and when I was about to relax again, I looked to the left, where all of a sudden this huge western dude wearing a black trench coat appeared out of nowhere. My pulse went from “resting” to “leaving a high speed corkscrew rollercoaster” in the fraction of a second, and for a crippling moment I felt paralyzed – that’s when I realized that I was standing next to a huge mirror covering the whole wall! (And of course then I also remembered seeing the mirror before, reminding myself that it was there so I would not get the shock of my life… obviously I failed.)

Overall the Jingoro Hotel was an average exploration. Some vandalism, some decay, some nice areas, some nasty smells, some positive surprises, some negative surprises. I’ve been to worse places, but also to many that were a lot more interesting – like I said, it’s been three and a half years since I explored the Jingoro Hotel without mentioning it anywhere on Abandoned Kansai, so obviously I wasn’t in a hurry to write about it. Nevertheless I hope you enjoyed the little stories and some of the photos. In the end the package turned out to be much more interesting than I expected… just like the exploration itself.

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Japanese Castle Hotel

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Haikyo, Hotel / Ryokan, Japan, Photography, Travel, Urbex, Video, Visited in 2014 on 2015/02/24| 7 Comments »

Japan and Germany are both famous for their castles – the ones in Japan are either tourist attractions or (in very rare cases) abandoned. In Germany there is a third kind, the ones that were turned into accommodations. Youth hostels, hotels or private homes; usually located in a very beautiful landscape on top of a mountain. To the best of my knowledge all “castle hotels” in Japan are hotels NEAR famous castles, not former castles themselves. Until a few years ago there was one sort-of exception, a huge hotel that kind of looked like a pre-modern fortress, but was a post-war concrete construction – similar to the tourist trap called Osaka Castle… 😉
Then the Great Tohoku Earthquake a.k.a. 3/11 hit the northern half of Japan in 2011, and while the hotel was spared the flood, it suffered some damages from the earthquake and its aftershocks. Even worse: tourists avoided the area between Tokyo and Hokkaido like the plague… or an earthquake-ridden nuclear wasteland… and so the Japanese Castle Hotel had to close its doors.
In 2013 I saw a video on Youtube (now offline…), taken at the then closed / abandoned hotel – everything was in almost pristine condition, I couldn’t believe my eyes. It looked like the best abandoned hotel ever! I had to find it somehow, yet I failed for months. In early 2014 I was talking with my urbex buddy Rory about (finding) new locations and I sent him a link to the then still working video. A few days later he got back to me: his wife watched the video, too, and based on that she not only found the hotel’s location, but its Twitter account and blog, too. In moments like that I wish my Japanese was better…
Almost a year had gone by since I first watched the (edited) walkthrough, but I still considered it one of the most amazing and rarest abandoned places in Japan – so I got a plane ticket to the north and headed there a couple of months later. Upon arrival at the hotel disappointment set in quickly: it wasn’t abandoned… not even closed – it was under renovation! This was only the third time I’ve heard that a once abandoned place was under renovation. The first was a windmill restaurant, the second a regular hotel. Now this…

But well, what can you do – you gotta roll with the punches. My two fellow explorers though seemed to be of different opinion. Judging by their faces, they would have called it a day and went straight to dinner instead, but I took a plane to explore this very location… and an open door and the noise of construction work in the background wouldn’t prevent me from doing so!
We carefully progressed through the building, trying to avoid making any noise, but sooner or later the inevitable happened – we ran into a construction worker. Luckily my friends agreed to my strategy, so instead of trying to bolt, we approached the guy and explained to him what we were doing. He clearly thought we were crazy, but didn’t mind that we were hanging around taking photos… and from that point on it was easy going.
Now you might ask yourself the question whether or not exploring a hotel under renovation belongs on a blog about urban exploration. Personally I prefer 100% abandoned places, but that’s the ideal. Most of the interesting locations, especially in Europe and the States, are patrolled by security, so technically they are not abandoned either; and who could imagine urbex in Japan without *Nara Dreamland*? So this was kind of a special exploration and very interesting in its own way, as the renovation work wasn’t limited to roofing and a new layer of paint for the building. While some of the rooms were in surprisingly bad condition considering that only three years had passed since 3/11, others just had been renovated, still looking and smelling brand-new. That before / after experience is almost as rare as castle shaped hotels in Japan… and I truly enjoyed it, almost as much as the gorgeous weather and the beautiful architecture, including shots of the damaged roof with its shachihoko, a Japanese folklore creature with the head of a tiger and the body of a carp.
Sadly once again time was of the essence, so in the end I had to squeeze an exploration that should have taken at least three hours into less than one – nevertheless I am happy that I was able to see the Japanese Castle Hotel at the beginning of its renovation. I have to admit that it was not as spectacular as I hoped it would be (not nearly as impressive as the *Hachijo Royal Hotel*!), but it still was one of those unique places you long to see as an urban explorer, as there are hundreds of other abandoned hotels all over the country – but none of them looks like a Japanese castle…

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Hachijo Royal Hotel

Posted in Asia, Closed, Haikyo, Hotel / Ryokan, Japan, Kanto, Photography, Tokyo, Travel, Urbex, Video, Visited in 2014 on 2014/12/30| 27 Comments »

The most beautiful abandoned looking hotel I have never entered – this title goes to the Hachijo Royal Hotel, once the biggest hotel in all of Japan. I went there twice, at sunset and the next morning just after sunrise, both times I ran into several people, both times I had a feeling that this hotel wasn’t really abandoned… and I turned out to be right. Half a year after my visit several Japanese explorers changed their reports about the hotel, some of them apologizing – apparently they had been contacted by the current management…

In the past two years more and more allegedly abandoned hotels on *Hachijojima* popped-up on Japanese urbex blogs, and when I decided in early 2014 to have a look myself, I went there with one very specific picture in my mind: the front of the Hachijo Royal Hotel, the first photo of the gallery at the end of the article. Sadly none of those blogs did much research on the hotel’s history, so I had to dig a little bit deeper, like so many times before…
The Hachijo Royal Hotel was opened in 1963 – eight years after the former military airport on Hachijojima was turned over to civilian control and four years after the local tourist office was established. At the time the biggest hotel in all of Japan (according to one of the people I spoke with) the owning company celebrated their then-president Eiji Yasuda with a statue of himself in the vast park of the resort. Tourism on the Izu Islands was booming back then, especially on Hachijojima, since the government nicknamed it the “Hawaii of Japan” in an attempt to give the island a positive image and the population of Tokyo a warm place to visit. That couldn’t have sit very well with Okinawa back then as all they got were quite a few American military bases; something they are not really happy with till that very day. Nowadays Japanese people prefer to go to Okinawa or the real Hawaii. Most likely due to Hachijojima’s lack of sand beaches and spare time offers other hiking, surfing and diving – resulting in a steep decline of tourism on Hachijojima. In 1996 the Hachijo Royal Hotel reopened as the Pricia Resort Hachijo… as in Pricia Resort Yoron on one of the Okinawan islands. The Pricia Resort Hachijo closed in August 2003 and re-opened on June 1st 2004 as the Hachijo Oriental Resort, which is still written on the main entrance, the road sign and a car with license plates parked on the premises. In 2005 “Trick the Movie 2” was shot at the hotel, the sequel to a movie, based on a three season long Japanese comedy drama TV show. It seems like the hotel was closed again around that time, which is just proves how quickly places decay when they are refused any maintenance, especially on an island surrounded by saltwater.

I first arrived at the Hachijo Royal Hotel in the afternoon of a gorgeous spring day. This was one of the last big ticket items I really wanted to explore in Japan, so I was quite nervous when I approached. Thanks to Google Street View I knew that I would be able to get close to the hotel without jumping any fences, but I also knew that there would be a barber shop near the back, just across the street. To fill some of the blanks, I first approached the area that the Street View car couldn’t access – and of course the first thing I saw were two cars with license plates parked directly in front of the main entrance, a Suzuki Carry kei truck a little further in the back. Darn! Would my exploration end 30 seconds into it? Luckily it didn’t. I kept myself together and walked up to the cars, prepared for some small talk with an owner, security guard or some construction workers. Turns out the whole thing was a false alarm – all cars had flat tires, some were rusty beyond repair… and the kei truck was labelled Blues Mobile; very funny! I had a look around and it seems like the Hachijo Royal Hotel consisted of two parts. The main building with its amazing back towards the waterfront – and a White House style annex building opposite the main entrance. Following a couple of dozen photos, I started the obligatory video tour, when suddenly a huge roar was thundering down the coastal road, apparently a couple of bikers, also enjoying this warm spring day. Okay, second attempt, starting next to the White House annex. A minute or two into it, I just arrived at the main entrance, an old guy walking his cat size lap dog showed up in the background, so I stopped filming and approached him with a smile, again ready for some small talk. Sadly the guy seemed to be in a very bad mood (no surprise, I would be embarrassed, too, being seen in public with a dog like that…) and literally tried to shoo me away; which actually pissed me off quite a bit, because Senior McLapdog obviously had about as many rights to be there as I had; at least I tried to be a friendly person. Long story short, I pretended to go away, but ran into him again as I need to go back to take the video I wanted to take. After a while he finally left, but I wouldn’t have been the first vengeful person to call the police, so for the next hour or so I made sure to stay on public ground; after I took the video, of course.
The back of the hotel with its amazing gigantic and partly overgrown pool area as well as a huge park was mind-blowingly beautiful and all I hoped it would be – strangely enough it faced the main road, so the back of the hotel was the front… or vice versa. Anyway, I took some shots and after I was pretty confident that the police wouldn’t show up any time soon… I was approached by another elderly on his bike, telling me about the history of the hotel. 10 minutes later, the guy was finally out of sight, I walked up to the hotel. Up there were some outdoor showers, another (small) pool, a few European style statues, at one point in time probably water fountains, and a back entrance, blocked from the inside with a large rusty sickle! When you think you’ve seen it all… It was getting dark pretty quickly and I didn’t bring my tripod, so went for a stroll along the coast and for dinner at a sushi restaurant, serving flying fish, amongst other local delicacies.
Right after I woke up the next morning I went back to the Hachijo Royal Hotel. Different light from a different direction… but pretty much the same amount of people passing by. Heck, nobody was getting in or out, but the area was as busy as a beehive! After a friendly morning talk with a female dog walker I took some photos as the seriously damaged tennis courts before heading back to the “backfront”, to finally grab the photo I really wanted to take. A conversation with another biker later I finally descended to the partly overgrown pool area. One of the two changing areas looked like somebody was squatting there for a while (and what better place for that than an island so warm that it offers a free camping site all year long?), but other than that it looked as abandoned as the rest of the hotel – so signs of maintenance, no signs of any ownership, except for years old, trampled down ropes here and there. In its heydays the gigantic pool must have been amazing, at the time of my visit it was barely accessible – especially the concrete pathway with steps towards the backfront with the smaller pool and all the statues was completely overgrown and barely visible.
Even without entering the Hachijo Royal Hotel, it was a great experience exploring this wonderful resort and its absolutely stunning seaside front. It’s quite a big photo gallery this time, so make sure to not miss the hidden gems, like the picture on which the sun is setting behind Mount Hachijo-Fuji while a plane is just leaving for Tokyo’s Haneda airport. The four videos I publish show most of the resort’s exterior and I hope they will give you a better impression of how gorgeous the place really was. If there really still is an owner, I really hope he will act quickly and spend some money to save this modern classic – it’s one of those places that would really deserve to be saved!

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Hachijo Royal Hotel

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Gunma Ski Resort

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Gunma, Haikyo, Hotel / Ryokan, Japan, Kanto, Photography, Ski, Sports, Travel, Urbex, Video, Visited in 2014 on 2014/12/02| 13 Comments »

The skiing season in Japan started just recently – time to present one of three rather big abandoned ski resorts I visited this year!

Opened in December of 1990 (according to a commemorative stone attached to the spotless bright white building with its turquoise window frames) the Gunma Ski Resort was partly shut down in 2004 and closed in early 2006 – during those years, parts of the property were turned into a soccer camp (in addition to the regular camping site from June till October).
Originally the resort offered four courses for beginners and advanced skiers. A 100 meter long Family Hill, a 1800 meter long Easy Rider Path, a 1000 meter long Challenger Path and a 6000 meter long Heli Ski Course – yeah, those were the good old days of the Japanese asset price bubble; only the best was good enough! Four lifts (and at least one helicopter…) transported guests up the mountain, the main one with a capacity of 2400 passengers per hour. The lifts were 3800 Yen per day (or 300 Yen per ride), the helicopter charged 7000 Yen per person and ride. The rental shop was equipped with 500 sets of skis and 150 snowboards, charging 3000 Yen or 4000 Yen per day respectively – skiwear rental was an additional 3000 Yen.
Interestingly enough the resort didn’t feature any private hotel rooms – just a few large bunk bed halls called Rest Rooms, charging 2000 Yen per night and small bed; at first I thought they were for children napping, but it seems like they were for all skiing guests small enough to fit, available from 9 p.m. till 10 a.m.
At the base lodge there were two restaurants on the second floor. The buffet style Grille Buffalo and the cafeteria style Café U.S.A – yes, no third dot! Strangely enough the latter one sold predominantly stuff like ramen, udon and soba. Both restaurants had separate kitchens that were connected in the back… and both restaurants suffered quite a bit from vandalism and airsoft matches.

Overall the Gunma Ski Resort was still in surprisingly good condition at the time of my visit, considering that it was closed and subsequently abandoned almost a decade ago.
The main floor with the ski rental, ski school and gift shop suffered from some severe vandalism as windows and doors were smashed (I guess it didn’t look *haikyo* enough to some people…), things were thrown around and stolen, mold started to take over one room or the other. At the end of one hallway there was the wooden silhouette of a person against a window, in a position that clearly indicated “dead” – and if you had a closer look at the window you could see a bullet hole there. Spooky!
The restaurant floor was nice overall – some minor vandalism, especially in the kitchens, countless airsoft bullets and a few barricades. Unspectacular (my personal favorite: the cracked open tea machine), but nice. The rest room floor suffered again from a couple of broken windows, resulting in slightly moldy sheets, walls and carpets. Personally I would have preferred to see it in spotless condition, but I guess you could say that the green banana has ripened, if vandalism is what you are looking for in abandoned places. Luckily the elevator control room on the roof gave me what I wanted as it was basically pristine. But the general rule of thumb was: the closer you got to the entrance, the more noticeable the stench of mold and spilled gasoline became. Actually to a point that I was worried about potential health issues, that’s why I didn’t film the lowest floor when I did the video tour at the end of the exploration. I only had a quick look, following my fellow explorer friend *Hamish* – and actually something good came out of it. In one of the office rooms, Hamish heard kind of a rattling metal noise, coming from a trash can under a window. It turned out that a rodent caused it, desperately trying to escape the fatal trap – another rodent already dead next to it. They must have fallen from a window sill, unlikely as it seemed, because that was the only way to get even close to the opening of the trash can. Strange little fella, like a mouse, but with a much longer nose – please have a look at the last video, maybe you can identify it? Of course we did the right thing, so Hamish carried the trash can outside and toppled it over to free the little fella. After the *hedgehog at the abandoned shipyard* the second animal life I was part of saving this year. “Abandoned Kansai – exploring since 2009, saving lives since 2014!”

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Karuizawa Fishing Park

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Gunma, Haikyo, Hotel / Ryokan, House, Japan, Kanto, Photography, Sports, Travel, Urbex, Video, Visited in 2014 on 2014/11/25| 6 Comments »

The Japanese love fishing – not just whales and dolphins, but in general. When I grew up, I saw short bits on TV about swimming pool like fishing ponds in Tokyo, right next to trains rattling by. Now that I live in Japan, I see anglers at almost all bodies of water, especially in the countryside – even in the mountains at 600 or 700 meters of elevation.
Karuizawa is a small town of about 18,000 people in Nagano prefecture, just two hours outside of Tokyo by car; or half that time when using a Shinkansen super express train. While never hosting Olympic games by itself, Karuizawa was host to the equestrian events of the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics and to the curling events of the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics, making it the only place in the world hosting events for both Summer and Winter Olympics. But even without this little know fun fact Karuizawa is a really lovely town on the base of the active complex volcano Mount Asama, mostly consisting of small houses on surprisingly large parcels of land, surrounding a gorgeous small city center with lots of German, French and British influence; if there ever will be a Japanese remake of Groundhog Day, it should be filmed in Karuizawa!
Attracting predominantly Japanese tourists from Tokyo trying to escape the dreadful summer heat or looking for some skiing fun in winter, Karuizawa offers all kinds of outdoor activities.

A fishing park just outside of Karuizawa offered retreats for companies, universities and youth groups; adding tennis courts, a gateball court and a community center with pool billiard and karaoke to the list of recreational activities. Not much of it is left these days – a couple of rotting buildings as well as some left behind items.
What elevated this exploration and made it quite memorable was another encounter with wildlife; a fox this time, to be more specific. My exploration buddy Hamish and I were just entering the lower level of a barn like structure (see photo…) when we heard animal footsteps from the floor above. We took a couple of photos of the missing floor and the building in general when out of nowhere a fox came running down the broken wooden stairs and right at us. Not knowing what to do we just looked at each other, when the fox all of a sudden realized that he was not alone. In a 1960s cartoon like move he made a full break, turned around, sped up again and tried to escape through a window next to the flight of stairs… BOOM! The window was closed. Another try. Boom. And up the stairs he went, apparantly uninjured. Bursting into laughs about what just happened we continued to shoot for a while, when Hamish went out to the open again – seconds later the fox appeared, much more careful this time, seeing me and retreating again; it seems like he had been looking through a glass door and thought we left when he saw my buddy. Afterwards we left for good and never saw each other again… happy that it was such a shy creature and not some rabies ridden calf mangler!

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Hachijo Spa Hotel

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Haikyo, Hiking, Hotel / Ryokan, Japan, Kanto, Photography, Restaurant, Sports, Tokyo, Travel, Urbex, Video, Visited in 2014 on 2014/11/18| 18 Comments »

Japanese love their onsen hotels, accommodations with natural hot springs – they are popular all over the country and of course Hachijojima was no exception… until this hotel had to close for a quite bizarre reason!

I’ve written about Japanese bathing culture on Abandoned Kansai several times before, for example in my article about the *Meihan Spa Land* – usually not in a very flattering way as my first and for years last visit wasn’t a very pleasant one. The day that changed everything was April 28th 2014, when I first visited the abandoned Hachijo Spa Hotel… and then Mirahashi No Yu in the tiny village of Sueyoshi. Both visits I enjoyed surprisingly much in hindsight, despite or maybe because of my low expectations in both cases.

I wasn’t off to a good start when I got off the bus pretty much right next to a *koban*, one of those small neighborhood police stations you can find everywhere in Japan. It wasn’t so much that the first thing I saw was a koban – it was the sign in the window stating “on patrol” that worried me a little bit. But hey, what can you do? The show must go on… and it did. Walking up and down several different roads on Hachijojima’s steep slopes in search of the Hachijo Spa Hotel I got lost several times (GoogleMaps being rather useless in that specific area due to many additional roads big and small) – and when I finally found my way… I got passed by that friggin police car maybe 200 meters away from the hotel! Despite being a big tall foreigner far away from anything even remotely touristy, the cops ignored me, but of course my confidence was ruined when I finally arrived at the wooden fence that separated me from the abandoned hotel; even more so when I realized that said fence featured a brand-new chain and lock, which meant that someone checked on the place at least every once in a while and was invested enough to invest in basic security equipment like that.
Obviously I finally made it in somehow, otherwise there wouldn’t be any photos at the end of the article, but my first impressions of the Hachijo Spa Hotel confirmed the concerns I had before my visit – that it would be another rotten, rotting piece of moldy trash that was really boring and exhausting to explore. Even the gorgeous view from the lobby and the small arcade right next to it couldn’t cheer me up; not really a surprise after I explored the amazing *Arcade Machine Hotel* the day before. I tried to lighten up a bit, so I used the big mirror pillars in the lobby for some more creative photos before I headed outside and down the slope, where I found another part of the hotel as well as several tiny apartment buildings. While the latter were locked up, the hotel building hosted a big dining room, but everything was moldy and rotting, so I left after a few quick shots – the whole building was one big decaying health risk. Outside most of the roads and trails leading to more small buildings were overgrown, everything made of metal was rusting at a mind-blowing speed. I almost had given up when I saw steps leading underground somewhere, so I grabbed my flashlight to make up for the rather cowardly start.
To my surprise this rather short tunnel was the access point to one of the hotel’s pools / spa areas – and it was gorgeous! Back in the days it was an indoor area, but like I said, metal was rusting quickly and anything made of glass had been broken a long time ago, so this area surrounded by thick vegetation was its own little rundown paradise and definitely the highlight of the Hachijo Spa Hotel!
Which reminds me, I never mentioned why this hot spring hotel had to close its doors. Guess! Okay, you don’t have to guess. You would have been wrong anyway if you would have said “lack of customers”. The main reason this hot spring hotel had to close was… because the hot spring dried out!
No hot spring, no hot spring hotel…

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Hachijo Spa Hotel

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