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Archive for the ‘House’ Category

Showa Era Onsen Town Apartment Building

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Haikyo, House, Japan, Photography, Travel, Urbex on 2025/07/29| 10 Comments »

If you are looking for abandoned buildings in Japan, go to an (old) onsen town. There is no guaranty that you’ll find a spectacular ruin, it’s actually rather unlikely – but it’s almost guaranteed that you’ll stumble across a derelict building or two… or two dozen. Snack bars, restaurants, shops, ryokan, barbers, in some cases even museums and strip clubs. Oh, and of course onsen. You can find all these things and more in old onsen towns, even those that are still (rather) successful.
On my many weekend trips across Japan I often end up in one of those towns. Mid-sized, mid-aged, mid-successful – just mid. In this case a planned exploration failed, but when I had a look across the street, I saw a mid-sized building, apparently abandoned, but mostly shielded from prying eyes by a bunch of trees. I came all the way from Kansai, so another 15 meters probably wouldn’t hurt me… quite the opposite! When I reached what once most likely was the building’s parking lot, I got a first view of what turned out to be one of my favorite exteriors of all time. Usually I prefer sunny days for reasons I’ve explained countless times, but in this instance the overcast weather created a perfectly desolate atmosphere. Sunshine would have cast weird shadows of the trees onto the building, making it difficult and most likely ugly to photograph – instead this cooperation of mid created a synergy that made a simple apartment building look spectacular. Well, the back of the building with all the balconies looked spectacular.
The rest of the building was rather mid… Quite a bit of trash near the back entrance / exit, most apartments either not accessible or empty / rotten. The green door with the paint flaking off was super cool though, so was the abandoned Showa era TV in one of the hallways. And the building itself was rather cool, temperature wise – which was cool with me, given that it was late spring already at the time of my exploration. And late spring is the new early summer in Japan. Just like late autumn is the new early autumn now. And summer is the hellish phase between early June and mid-October. But hey, shoganai, eh? Maybe you can use this nightmarish time to catch up with old articles on Abandoned Kansai?! If you like Japanese apartment buildings, check out *this really old one* and *this modern one* – I’m sure you’ll love them!
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Insta360 – How Is That Even Legal?

Posted in Abandoned, Aichi, Airport, Akita, Amusement Park, Animals, Aquarium, Asia, Asylum, Beijing, Berlin, Cemetery, China, Chugoku, Church, Chūbu, Cinema, Closed, Communications, Dark Tourism, Demolished, Depot, Driving School, Europe, Exhibition, Factory, Farm, Ferris Wheel, Festival, Fire Station, Food, Fukuoka, Fukushima, Gifu, Golf, Gunma, Haikyo, HDR, Hiking, Hiroshima, Hokkaido, Hospital, Hotel / Ryokan, House, Hyogo, Ibaraki, Ishikawa, Iwate, Japan, Kagawa, Kanagawa, Kanazawa, Kansai, Kanto, Kindergarten / Nursery, Kochi, Korea, Kumamoto, Kyoto, Kyushu, Lighthouse, Love Hotel, Mie, Military, Mine, Miyagi, Monochrome, Monument, Museum, Nagano, Nagasaki, Nampo, Nara, New Zealand, Night, Niigata, Non-Urbex, Oita, Okayama, Okinawa, Olympia, Original Find, Osaka, Pachinko, Photography, Power Station, Prison, Race Track, Restaurant, Roadside Attraction, Sacred Site, Saitama, Sapporo, School, Sex, Shiga, Shikoku, Shipyard, Shizuoka, Shrine, Ski, Snow, Spa / Onsen, Sports, Store, Strip Club, Supermarket, Taxidermy, Temple, Theater, Tochigi, Tohoku, Tokushima, Tokyo, Tottori, Transportation, Travel, University, Urbex, US Military, Video, Wakayama, Yamagata, Yamaguchi, Yamanashi, Zombies, Zoo on 2024/06/15| 15 Comments »

I’ve been urbexing for almost 15 years. During that time I’ve never written any articles about equipment, despite being very happy with three different Nikon DSLRs, two Manfrotto tripods, and a Sanyo video camera – which broke in 2019 after almost 15 years of recording countless hours at hundreds of locations as well as places like Chernobyl and North Korea. Videos I always considered a bonus anyway… and I’m still having a hard time thinking of myself as a photographer, given that I have no formal education in that field and only do it as a hobby. A really time-consuming hobby, but nevertheless just a hobby. I also don’t have a background in technology, so what’s the point of reviewing camera equipment when I just have an opinion based on learning by doing? Well, that doesn’t keep countless “influencers” and Youtubers from churning out incompetent nonsense, but I wouldn’t want to be found dead with either label on me! And like my favorite professor at university once said in regards to papers we had to hand in: “Don’t claim anything you can’t proof!”

Fortunately there is no need to be technical or scientific about this Insta360 X4 article, because unfortunately we never got that far…
Like I said, I always considered video walkthroughs of the locations I explore a bonus. I started them pretty much right away, but at first I didn’t even publish them, because I only took them for myself. And even when I published them, I didn’t edit them. No cuts, no voice overs. Just me walking around breathing heavily into the silence. That all came to a sudden halt when my Sanyo stopped working after exploring the abandoned *Trump Hotel*, also wiping out the recordings of the whole day. At that point I was tired of doing the videos anyway – and my co-explorers were increasingly annoyed, because I added 10 to 30 minutes at the end of every exploration for the walkthrough. So I stopped doing them.
For the past 18 months I’ve been exploring solo again (don’t ask, it’s complicated and often quite frustrating, to be honest), but a few weeks ago a colleague of mine showed me an older model Insta360 video camera that a visiting cousin from the States forgot at his place in Japan. I was fascinated by the easy to use 360 photos and videos, so I did some research and decided to get one. I’ve read reviews, I’ve read product pages – I did my best to make an informed decision, because at first I considered buying the X2 or X3 as older models often are cheaper with only slightly fewer / worse features. The X2 was out of the race when I read in a review that it required a smartphone to be activated – something I didn’t read anywhere about the X3 and X4. I guess because it’s an idea that is so stupid that it probably was a one-time mistake by Insta360, facing so much backlash that they removed the requirement from following models. The price difference between the X3 and X4 wasn’t very big and since the latter was only four weeks old at the time, the price on Amazon and in brick and mortar stores was the same, so I decided to get it at my local Yodobashi Camera (street block sized electronics stores with hundreds of employees each, in case you are not familiar with the chain), where I’ve been a customer for almost 18 years – ever since I moved to Japan.
BIG MISTAKE!

Yodobashi Camera was extremely stingy, giving only 1% points on the video camera, despite a promotional campaign of giving 13% points for purchases over amount X – except for (small print)… But when you shell out 80k Yen on a new video camera you are looking forward to use, store points are the last thing you worry about anyway. Fortunately I still had some of those points, which I used to get a seriously overpriced MicroSD card, because without it the video camera would be useless and I wanted to try it out on the weekend before an upcoming urbex trip. 83500 Yen poorer, but with a big smile on my face I left Yodobashi Camera on a Friday evening after an otherwise pretty horrible week.

Saturday was supposed to be a great day, though it started with a rude awakening / realization…
After sleeping in and having a delicious breakfast, I enjoyed a nice unboxing. The first slight disappointment was when I realized that the included battery was dead. Well, not dead dead, but completely empty. Whatever, an hour or two wouldn’t make a difference. It would not dent my great mood for sure. That came a few hours later when the battery was fully charged. I booted the small brick for the first time, its screen came to life, asking me to choose a language – and then the screen showed what the camera was seeing… for about a second or so. Then some text popped up and my heart sank. You gotta be kidding me! What I was looking at was a screen telling me to download an app by Insta360 to a smartphone, iOS or Android, to unlock the video camera. What. The. Heck? I literally felt it in my fingers how my blood-pressure exploded, because unlike pretty much every person on the planet above the age of 6 years I don’t own a smartphone. Never have. In the late 90s I had a black and white Nokia for work (yes, I’m not the youngest anymore, though I started working full-time in my early 20s). When I moved to Japan I had a flip phone or two, but for the past 15 years or so I didn’t have any mobile phone at all, smart or not, because I don’t like them as they turn way too many people into dumb zombies. So here I had a brand-new, quite expensive video camera… that forced me to make it usable by using another device with cameras? Who comes up with stupid ideas like that?!
Certainly not Nikon! Their D7500 DSLR I bought just weeks prior worked with a partly charged battery and regular SD cards straight out of the box 5 minutes after purchase – without any charging or unlocking BS!
So I started to do some research… and didn’t find much. Like I said, I couldn’t care less about smartphones, apps and all that stuff, so I tried to find a solution to unlock the darn X4 via PC or MicroSD card. Of course I couldn’t find anything about that either, so I contacted Insta360 directly – who apparently didn’t read my message and instead sent me a standard reply. So I got back to them, apologized for not describing my problem properly (I’ve been in Japan too long…), and this time got an answer that at least implied that they understood the situation I was in – without being able to help, because though it seems to be nowhere stated on the box, the promo material or even on the X4 website (at least back in mid / late May, maybe they changed it by now)… you really need a smartphone and the Insta360 app to use a newly bought X4 video camera, that seems to work perfectly fine, but is made not usable on purpose by the manufacturer. Which absolutely blows my mind!
How is that even legal?
How can a company force you to use a completely unrelated piece of expensive technology that actually partly does the job of the product you just bought, to make your purchase usable? Without mentioning that essential detail with big warnings before purchase! And in addition, forces you to use an app, which does who knows what in the background without one knowing?
What’s next? You need an electric bike with WiFi to unlock your newly bought car? And if you don’t… sucks to be you, it’s completely useless!

Yodobashi Camera – (The Lack Of) Customer Service In Japan!
After some back and forth it was Monday and I came to the conclusion that I won’t be able to use the Insta360 X4, because it really needs a smartphone to unlock, which wasn’t properly communicated. So after work I went back to Yodobashi Camera, my go-to electronics store for the past almost 18 years. Never had a problem with them, because all the products I bought worked as intended right out of the box. So I went back to the cashier counter where I bought the video camera… and already ran into the first minor bump in the road – apparently I hadn’t paid for it in the camera department, but a neighboring one, which wasn’t a problem on Friday evening, but very well on Monday evening. So I went 20 meters over to the camera department and told them about my unfortunate situation: That I had bought this video camera three days prior, but couldn’t use it, because it doesn’t work without a smartphone, which wasn’t properly communicated by Insta360 or Yodobashi Camera. But I was very careful with everything, I didn’t even remove the protective film from either of the lenses. Some air through the teeth sucking, some going back behind the counter to talk to a superior and then something like the following conversation – it’s in quotation marks, but they are not really quotes, you know… just something like that, from memory:
“I can’t sell this anymore, you opened the box. You can’t return it.”
“But I can’t use the video camera.”
“I can’t sell this anymore, you opened the box. You can’t return it.”
“I don’t have a smartphone. The X4 is useless to me.”
“I can’t sell this anymore, you opened the box. You can’t return it.”
“I did proper research and I only found out about this after I opened the box and tried to use the X4.”
“I can’t sell this anymore, you opened the box. You can’t return it.”
“I bought a D7500 last month, it worked out of the box…”
“I can’t sell this anymore, you opened the box. You can’t return it.”
“Then take it back and ask Insta360 to exchange the X4 – you have dozens of them here, you probably have to return one once in a while anyway.”
“I can’t sell this anymore, you opened the box. You can’t return it.”
“Are you serious? I’ve been a customer here for almost 18 years, spent millions at your store and other ones in the building that has your name. Never had a problem – and the first time I have, you are stonewalling me?”
“I can’t sell this anymore, you opened the box. You can’t return it.”
“Really?”
“I can’t sell this anymore, you opened the box. You can’t return it.”

At this point I gave up and exchanged a few more e-mails with Insta360 (“You should try to return the X4 where you bought it!” No kidding…), but their responses quickly became as useless and repetitive as the one of the guy at Yodobashi Camera – who is just a small cog in a big machine, so I don’t blame him; he’s punished enough with the lighting in the store and the uniform he has to wear all day.
So here we are, after me falling for the usual misconception about (customer) service in Japan, because I rarely ever had a real problem anywhere. It’s great as long as everything is within procedures – if somebody has planned for it, it most likely will go smoothly. Service is great. When service becomes customer service though, i.e. an individual customer needs help that requires improvisation outside of the planned service… you’re basically on your own. The only thing flexible in Japan is bamboo.

Nevertheless I still have moments when I wonder: AITAH?
I’m a huge believer in personal responsibility. If I make a mistake, I stand by it. I find behavior like ordering 20 items of clothes in different sizes and colors with the intention of sending 18 of them back despicable. In fact I’ve never sent anything back that I’ve ordered online, except for two USB-HDDs – and only because they didn’t work. I don’t do fast fashion, I don’t buy garbage from questionable sites like Shein oder Temu, I don’t replace electronics unless they are broken. (RIP, Nikon D7100!) I did due diligence before buying the Insta360 X4 and to this day everything in that (opened…) box is in mint condition. If I would have known about the smartphone requirement, I wouldn’t have bought the X4. It’s the reason why I didn’t buy the X2.
This is actually only the second time that I tell this story to anybody, because part of me is a bit ashamed that this series of unfortunate events happened – despite all the research before buying. But spending more than 80k on a useless brick of tech isn’t exactly something to be proud of. I don’t regret much in my life, but buying the Insta360 X4 I regret. And buying it at Yodobashi Camera is something I regret, too. Maybe Amazon would have been more accommodating with returns…
But I guess it is what it is – only money in the end. And no videos for Abandoned Kansai in the future. Heck, even if I would get the currently useless X4 to work, I would always be reminded of this story. Screw video cameras! Never was a fan, now I dislike them almost as much as smartphones. Which kind of closes the circle. But I’ll make sure to never ever even consider buying anything from Insta360 again – I still don’t understand how it’s even legal that they can do this. What’s next to unlock their cameras? Having to send them a voice message, swearing loyalty to Winnie the Xi(thead)? Apparently they can do anything without people questioning it…
I went back to Yodobashi Camera once more though, two days ago. I spent the remaining shop points I had on presents for my nephews without having to pay a single sen – my goal was it to hit +/- 20 points/Yen, but going to exactly 0 was priceless – and so I left the Yodobashi Camera building one last time with a big smile on my face. Upon arriving back home I cut up my loyalty card after almost 18 years. It probably doesn’t mean much to a large store chain like that. But it meant a lot to me!

Thank you for reading till the end and… What has your worst experience with Japanese (customer) service been? Write it in the comments!

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Genshiro Kawamoto’s Abandoned Mansions – The Final Chapter

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Haikyo, House, Japan, Photography, Shizuoka, Travel, Urbex on 2023/09/05| 11 Comments »

This is my third and final article about the abandoned villas owned by Japanese real estate mogul Genshiro Kawamoto. I’m sure the place will continue to pop up regularly on the interwebs, but I’m done with it…
Not only am I done with the mansions after repeatedly documenting them between 2016 and 2020, my final visit in spring of 2023 actually made me question once more what I’m doing here with Abandoned Kansai.

After tremendously enjoying traveling domestically all over Japan during the pandemic, it was tough to experience how mass tourism (after opening the floodgates again in October of 2022) altered the perception of places… or even the way to work. (Fun fact: Japan didn’t have a hard lockdown, freedom of movement was never limited, because pretty much everybody started wearing masks for more than three years from February of 2020 on; including kids. Meanwhile people were dying like flies all over the world as some morons claimed wearing a mask would take their freedom… while it turned out that not wearing one would take their lives.) Me being a history buff, I always wanted to go Shimoda. Expecting a significant rise in overseas tourist again in the years to come I took a chance in spring of 2023 and finally went there. I had been to the Izu Peninsula before, but with no time to spare, so it was very nice to spend a relaxing day on the southern tip. I made some stops in other areas of Shizuoka on the way to Shimoda, but on the last day I originally planned to go straight back to Osaka. A night in Atami though reminded me of the *Kanemochi Mansions* and how much I enjoyed them in the past. It had been more than three years since my previous visit, so I spontaneously decided to add a night in Atami, visit the mansions in the morning and return on less crowded trains in the afternoon. (Well, I thought the trains would be less crowded in the afternoon… they were during the pandemic… but not anymore!)
Since I was on a recreational vacation and not on a creative one, I was not prepared for this exploration at all – I even had to look up the bus to the mansions. Even worse: I didn’t bring my tripod as I only expected to take some daylight snapshots for family and friends back home of the place where Commander Matthew Perry (not the Friends guy!) “opened” Japan in the 19th century. Arriving at the Kanemochi Mansions in Atami (not Shimoda!) I was surprised by how much overgrown everything was… except for the now quite beaten path leading up to the main mansion; damaged furniture by the roadside where the short trail started. My excitement was instantly replaced by a queasy feeling. It had become rather quiet about the most famous abandoned villas in Japan over the last three years, hardly any photo, next to no articles (at least not in my social media sphere…). Word on the street was that Kawamoto (or at least his company) took control over the mansions again, installing security systems… which couldn’t have been further from the truth.
Just a few meters after the damaged desk, barely past the trampled barbed wire fence, I saw the first toppled and broken statue. The glass front of the villa, facing the pond, had some graffiti on, the windows on the second floor were completely gone. Access to the building had become gradually easier in the past, now I was able to just walk in as the massive glass pane facing the waterfront was partly smashed, too. And that was just the beginning…
To make a not so long story even shorter: The villa had been ransacked. I guess about half of the interior had been stolen (including a large paining and the Nautilus II toilet!), the other half had been vandalized in one form or another. People always commented on Kawamoto’s questionable level of taste, but at least there was some consistency and weird charm to the mansion. Now the building was just another couple of graffitied walls with broken stuff scattered around – Western urbex. But so much for “there is no vandalism in Japan”, which I already knew wasn’t true, but now you have photographic proof with some comparison photos at the end of the gallery. Not good comparison photos, because like I said, my final visit lacked preparation and equipment, but you’ll get an idea. Another “Japan is so superior in every regard” myth debunked…
The mix of fond memories, security rumors, and the disgusting amount of vandalism made this one of the worst urbex experience in my more than 13 years of enjoying this hobby. I basically only did a quick walkthrough, taking some snapshots here and there, leaving as fast as possible… to check out the second villa with the open space bedroom / office and the beautiful upper floor.
Same situation there – smashed mirrors, missing interior, massive glass front broken. BTW: We are not talking regular window glass here… that stuff was like 1.5-cm-/0.6-inch-thick glass, maybe more, probably some kind of security glass. We are still talking about the villa of a billionaire after all – not every schmock with a rock was supposed to gain access!
The thing is: For four years I absolutely loved the *billionaire’s villas*. Every trip there was exciting, I had the feeling that I found a very special place, easily in my personal Top 5; which isn’t easy considering that I logged more than 1000 explorations. Was it tough to keep the mansions a secret? YES, because if you take photos like that, you want to show them around – and NO, because I explore mainly for myself and I’m not the slightest interested in exposing abandoned places… I prefer to revisit them, which I actually barely ever do.
But then some idiots selfishly dragged the villas into the public eye to make Google (which owns Youtube) a fortune and to pick up some crumbs themselves. Other lowlifes quickly jumped onto the attention-whoring bandwagon and doxed the place – vandals did the rest. For four years I genuinely enjoyed this location every time I stopped by. Now this has been taken from me and the handful of other serious explorers. Can secrecy like ours stop places from getting vandalized? Obviously not, as long as there are careless assholes out there – but that doesn’t mean that we should contribute to that. Just because more and more people act like entitled trolls on the internet doesn’t mean that the remaining individuals can change that bad behavior – but this also doesn’t mean that they should pile onto the word vomit. Just be a decent person online and offline. And please don’t support large channels / groups / social media accounts with the focus on urban exploration – they are killing the hobby! If not actively, then at least indirectly… 😦

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Japanese Billionaire’s Abandoned Villas

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Haikyo, House, Japan, Photography, Shizuoka, Travel, Urbex on 2023/08/30| 6 Comments »

Welcome to the sequel article about the *Kanemochi Mansions*! Sorry that it took me a while…

In 1993 Ginza’s property king Genshiro Kawamoto, age 61 at the time, was at the height of his power and wealth – worth about 2.6 billion USD, he was the 72th richest person on the planet, owning 60 buildings in Japan (almost all named Marugen) and about 700 houses in the States. He already had a somewhat questionable reputation but furthered it even more in the 2000s when he rented multi-million dollar mansions to native Hawaiian families for next to nothing to drive down property values in the area, after evicting hundreds of families in California just a few years earlier to benefit from rising real estate prices. In the 2010s (and well into his own 80s) Kawamoto predominantly made news for tax evasion when his Marugen Group “forgot” to pay more than 1 billion Yen in taxes. In 2013 he was first arrested and in November of 2018 he was sentenced to four years in prison… and disappeared from the news; no word whether Kawamoto is (still) in prison or if he is on the run.

Back in 2019 a few adventure tourists from overseas somehow made it to Kawamoto’s abandoned cluster of private mansions in Atami, at the time a location hardly known even amongst Japanese urban explorers. Unfortunately the mix of unusual interior and lurid headlines generated millions of views, a new “must see” location in Japan was born, after *Nara Dreamland* was torn down in late 2016.
I had been documenting the natural decay of the villas since early 2016, but kept the material to myself, because I knew what could happen to locations when you drag them into the public eye – something the Youtube locusts obviously don’t care about…
In February of 2020, when the initial damage was done and Covid was about to prevent urbex tourists from entering Japan, I finally posted about the Kawamoto villas here on Abandoned Kansai under the name *Kanemochi Mansions* – my largest photo set with one of the shortest articles, containing much less information than your average video description. (In case you wonder why kanemochi – 金持ち means rich person in Japanese and was a good way to avoid Kawamoto’s real name without calling the location something really obscure. 🙂 )

So… Why now? Why this article with all the detailed information now? Well, the information here actually is not really new, other people have spread it long before me. I just wanted to show you this amazing location one more time with beautiful photos from back in the day, before the unwanted attention and questionable fame… with different weather, at different times of the year, at different times of the day. I truly love(d) the Kawamoto mansions, so I came back several times, despite the long way from Osaka. And if you know Abandoned Kansai longer than a recent Google search, you are probably aware that me writing an article like that doesn’t mean good news…
To be continued!

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Kyoto Company Countryside Retreat

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Haikyo, House, Japan, Photography, Travel, Urbex on 2023/07/05| 5 Comments »

Nothing like exploring an original find in the countryside – and this one was a beauty! Exclusively on Abandoned Kansai… 🙂

A while ago I took a bus through the countryside when I spotted this partly overgrown, massive wooden gate along a road in the middle of a forest. I made a note and was able to find the place on GoogleMaps when I got home, even verified it via StreetView. Behind the gate and in the forest I saw several roofs, so… chances were that I stumbled across another original find. The area was accessible by public transport, but not easily, so it took me a while to get back there – and it was well worth the trip!
The problem with original finds and exploring by public transport is that those places are, even more so than established locations, basically impossible to plan for. In the past I had as little as 15 minutes to explore and document a place as this was either the only connection to the middle of nowhere – or I would have had to stay 5 hours, basically ruining the rest of the day… and maybe be done after 20 minutes anyway. Usually I plan with 2 hours per exploration. Good for most locations, but even if it’s a fantastic place you can cover a lot of ground in that time. And if it’s a dud, I can sit down and relax for an hour… or 90 minutes… or 110. Unfortunately, 2 hours is not always an option. In this case I had about 45 minutes, though 120 minutes would have been perfect!
I got past the gate surprisingly easily and finally had a look at what was behind – a series of rather modern buildings with large glass elements, some connected by a wooden deck and / or a bridge on the upper floor. Steel, glass, concrete; quite 21st century. I still don’t know what this place was exactly, but judging by what I saw and based on the phone number I spotted on a sign, belonging to a company in Kyoto City, I assume it was one of those infamous company retreats. (One of the benefits working for a Japanese company of decent size and reputable image is access to one or more company retreats. Most of them are located in / near onsen towns or along the coast. Some are simple huts with self-catering, others are fully staffed mini resorts with a pool, arcade machines, a gym, access to a nearby country club, … Employees can use those facilities, usually located within two hours of driving from the main office, for free or a small fee.) Unfortunately I was in a hurry – and all the doors were locked. No signs of vandalism whatsoever. No broken things, no graffiti, no BB bullets. Just those amazing buildings in the afternoon sun, pure bliss, surrounded by nature. But the buildings seemed to be empty anyway, so in the end I was very pleased with the photos I took.

My expectations when walking up to the Kyoto Company Countryside Retreat were super low. “Roofs behind an abandoned looking gate” means nothing in Japan, could have been anything, including demolished the week before. What I found was a building complex, a small compound, that I absolutely loved. This was my kind of exploration, my kind of architecture. I didn’t want to leave, but I had to; buses and trains aren’t waiting for anybody. So I left with a heavy heart. Because it was such a stunning place – and because I felt like I wouldn’t be able to share it on Abandoned Kansai for a long time as I didn’t want to drag it into the public eye. But then I figured… that if I wouldn’t publish the photos of the gate, the Kyoto Company Countryside Retreat would be almost impossible to find. So, after thinking about it for a while, I selected some pictures, wrote up this little article and… well… here we are. I’m 99.99% sure that you won’t be able to find photos of those abandoned buildings anywhere else on the internet – it was the solo exploration of an original find, even my closest urbex friends don’t know that I’ve explored it… or when… or that this place exists (to the best of my knowledge – maybe they went there 5 years ago and decided not to publish it, like I initially did… 🙂 ). Please enjoy the gallery below and feel free to share this article with any of your friends who might be interested in Japan, urban exploration or just unusual things in general.
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Arima Onsen Retreat

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Haikyo, House, Hyogo, Japan, Kansai, Photography, Travel, Urbex, Video, Visited in 2016 on 2022/01/12| 1 Comment »

A small location, popular amongst a handful of Japanese explorers for a little while – the Arima Onsen Retreat.

During the Japanese real estate bubble in the late 80s, early 90s it became increasing popular for somewhat successful companies to have a holiday home for employees – everything from simple huts for self-caterers to small resorts with dedicated staff, everything from private trips for two employees and their families to seminar houses for whole teams. Popular areas were somewhat remote mountains with a view… and of course the outskirts of onsen towns. When the bubble collapsed, many of those companies couldn’t afford these houses anymore, and since nobody wanted to buy them, thousands of them were abandoned all over Japan, resulting in countless completely or half abandoned holiday villages. From an urbex point of view most of these places are rather uninteresting as the majority looked like wooden bungalows or regular residential buildings – and most of them were tightly locked, so unless some vandals or burglars broke in, access was rather tough.
One of the few exceptions was the Arima Onsen Retreat, a rather large company vacation houses in, you’ve guessed it, Arima Onsen – one of the oldest and most famous onsen towns in Japan, easily accessible from Kobe (30 minutes), Osaka (60 minutes), and Kyoto (90 minutes). Unfortunately there is not much to say about this exploration as it was basically a mostly empty apartment building – some chandeliers, a drum kit and a mahjong table were among the items left behind.
On one of the walls was a video intercom system I took a photo of, because it was one of the few somewhat interesting things there. Even more interesting: The interphone was manufactured by a company called アイホン or Aiphone… founded decades before Apple in Nagoya. When Apple released their iPhone in Japan, they applied for a trademark, but had to withdraw as their chosen term was confusingly similar to the already registered trademark of Aiphone. Both companies agreed out of court that the iPhone should been known as アイフォーン in katakana writing – and that Airphone should receive 100 million Yen, about 850,000 USD in 2006, for this unbureaucratic solution. In 2015 Aiphone released an intercom system that could be linked to the iPhone…

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Kanemochi Mansions

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Haikyo, House, Japan, Photography, Travel, Urbex on 2020/02/26| 21 Comments »

One Japanese billionaire and his three abandoned mansions – the perfect urbex location?

Gosh, there is so much to say about this guy and his three luxury mansions, but currently I have neither the time nor the motivation to write everything up properly. So please consider this a first look and a (high class) picture dump. I’m already gathering information for a proper bullshit-free article with even more spectacular photos and some videos, but there is a lot of background story to talk about, so stay tuned. Until then please enjoy the following picture set, containing photos from several visits since 2016!

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Weekend House

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Haikyo, House, Japan, Photography, Travel, Urbex on 2019/05/07| 3 Comments »

My busy phase continues, so does the series of articles about small locations and failed explorations. This week: an abandoned weekend home, most likely for rent.

I hate to publish photo sets without giving much context, but there is really next to nothing to say about the abandoned Weekend House. A friend and I found it after exploring another place nearby and we were lucky that it was abandoned, too – the door was closed, but unlocked, so we went in. Small kitchen in the hallway, to the right the main living room with another fridge, a table and several seating options. Definitely the daytime area to spend a good time with family and / or friends. Upstairs a similar setup, but much more empty floor space – probably the main sleeping room; on the ground, Japanese style. The third floor was little more than a crow’s nest, basically one small room, big enough for two people tops, but with a stunning view at the surroundings. And I mean really stunning! I explored this place in early spring, when Japan is rather barren, but the view from up there was nevertheless gorgeous!

And that’s basically it. I don’t know when the Weekend House was built, I don’t know when it was abandoned, I don’t know what exactly it was used for – all I know that it could be saved. One day of cleaning, mostly animal poo, and the place would be ready for a family to move in. Unfortunately that’s unlikely to happen as Japan has much more living space in the countryside than it needs, so I guess in 10 years the latest this place will be overgrown and beyond repair – like so many others… Unlike the hotel last week, this was actually a fun exploration I really enjoyed – especially the versatile bench in the living room, which reminded me of one my family had when I was a child.

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Dracula’s House

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Haikyo, House, Japan, Kansai, Photography, Travel, Urbex, Video on 2019/03/05| 1 Comment »

Dracula’s House? In Japan? We all know he lived in a castle and was about to buy a house in London! Did he really need another vacation home? In Japan, of all places? I bet it took him quite a few nights as a bat to get there!

About three years ago, maybe in late 2015, I saw a screenshot of GoogleMaps on Twitter, showing a large brown structure on satellite view; a building the publisher called “Dracula’s House”. On the one hand I consider teases like that a dick move, on the other hand… on the other hand I love them, because I am excellent at finding stuff at GoogleMaps most people fail at as I’m tenacious and very lucky in that regard. Back then the 3D view of SatelliteView was rather new, so to see a screenshot like that was rather unusual. I looked on GoogleMaps… and looked… and kept looking… and looking… and about an hour later I found Dracula’s House. Muahahahahaha! Be careful what you tease with, you might give away more than you intend to! (Years prior I found the now demolished *Daikyo Driving School* under similar circumstances… 🙂 ) Fortunately Dracula’s House was only a medium train ride and a long walk away from the closest station, so I decided to explore this big unknown place solo…
… which was probably a good idea, because Dracula’s House looked much nicer on GoogleMaps and even from the outside than from inside – fellow explorers, especially those who don’t appreciate a rare find, probably wouldn’t have been too excited, especially five minutes into the actual exploration. At first look and from the outside Dracula’s House was awesome – a withered large, wooden barn-like structure; quite Western style. Upon closer look it became apparent that the place was almost completely gutted, only the exterior walls were still standing – pretty much all interior walls were gone and I started to wonder how Dracula’s House kept standing upright; of course being there on quite a windy day didn’t help. Neither did the fact that there was a mamushi (a.k.a. Japanese pit viper) warning sign. I’ve run into snakes before, luckily none of them were aggressive or even attacked, but as somebody who likes nature tamed or grilled I’d rather stay away from venomous creatures.

Even more than three years after exploring Dracula’s House this dilapidated location is still a rather rare one, though I seriously doubt that it is still standing. Too bad that there is not much else around worth exploring, otherwise a revisit would be in order. And I’ve heard rumors of barbed wire and people having an eye on it, so why risking trouble when I can spend my time explore previously undocumented abandoned places?

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Japanese Western House

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Haikyo, House, Japan, Photography, Travel, Urbex on 2019/01/29| 5 Comments »

Outside castle, inside tatami – this abandoned house between the cultures withstood a short hype phase, yet it’s its questionable structurally soundness that makes its survival a miracle.

For some reason there is always a big fuzz about abandoned Western style houses in Japan. There was one near Tokyo, and it when it turned out that the previous owners were high society with ties to the Imperial family the property literally got trampled to the ground by the oh so careful and secret urbex scene in Japan, which is amazing, considering that it’s rather small in comparison to America and especially Europe; and that the average person is much smaller in Japan…
Anyway, when a similar house appeared in another part of Japan paranoia was big – several people published pictures at the same time and suddenly “the scene” became extremely suspicious about who had what information and would be able to take whom there. I was relying on help, too, so out of respect I waited several years with this article and won’t neither mention the area the house is in nor who made it possible for me to go there. Since the hype has died down significantly since this location first came up, I guess it’s “safe” to publish it now.
Sitting like a haunted mansion on a hill, access to the Japanese Western House turned out to be quite difficult for many reasons: fences, gates, steep slopes, at least one unchained dog, neighbours, construction, demolition – it felt like everything was going on at the same time and we somehow had to maneuver through the perimeter like a nightmarish real-life game of Frogger. At least there was no water involved. Wouldn’t have been the first (or the last!) time…

But hey, after some back and forth we finally made it into the surprisingly contorted house – and the entrance area kept the tension alive as it looked like somebody could show up any second to continue some long necessary renovation work. As learned at the *Deathtrap Hotel* we went to the lowest floor and made our way up, though it probably would have been easer for my nerves if we would have started upstairs as the semi-basement looked like it could have collapsed any minute and was only propped by a 4×4 timber or two – one low kick and probably the whole friggin house would have folded like Kevin Spacey should have. And we, being happy finally being inside, took the risk like a bunch of inexperienced schmocks. But hey, the upper floor with its western main room (thick sofas and couches) as well as the ground floor with the large tatami rooms that once must have featured jaw-dropping views offered some pretty decent photo opportunities that were clearly tainted by the overcast-rainy weather and the more than unfortunate circumstances (not knowing if the house was really, really abandoned while knowing for sure that the basement was one clumsy move away from letting tons of material sliding down the slope).

I never thought about it before, but exploring the Japanese Western House would probably easily make it onto my Top 5 list of most uncomfortable urbex experiences – and that list would include my run-ins with authorities, though not even all of them. I was out of so many comfort zones that at one point I stopped counting. But the hype beforehand dragged me in, the beauty of some rooms kept me… and some chances don’t come back – you gotta explore when you have the opportunity to do so, only a handful of locations look better in a couple of years; most look worse or will be gone. So, no regrets – and I hope you’ll enjoy the gallery below!

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