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Archive for the ‘Japan’ Category

Minato Naval Hospital

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Chūbu, Haikyo, Hospital, Japan, Photography, Shizuoka, Travel, Urbex, Visited in 2015 on 2025/08/29| 5 Comments »

As much as I dislike hospitals and mistrust doctors in real life (I’m grateful for them, but to me they are a necessary evil fighting for good) as much do I enjoy clinics and other health facilities when they are abandoned. Japan has not only plenty of them (I must have explored more than 50 over the years), but the variety is also amazing. Everything from *local doctors with a pharmacy in their wooden countryside mansions* to *large concrete monsters with modern machinery* – and except for a handful now vandalized or demolished ones, they are also among the hardest to find abandoned places; even Japanese explorers with no English skills whatsoever occasionally contact me for coordinates.

One of my favorite up till now unpublished abandoned medical facilities is the Minato Naval Hospital – an institution so old that the nearest modern JSDF base is about 60 kilometers away, the nearest JSDF naval base even 100 kilometers. The hospital was established in 1923, though the building featured in this article was constructed in 1932. 65 years later it was reorganized into another facility and probably closed as part of the restructuring of national hospitals. In 2012 the institution was renamed and moved to nearby Shimoda where it still exists as the Shimoda Medical Center.

I explored the Minato Naval Hospital back in 2015 on my way to the now demolished *Irozaki Jungle Park* – so I guess it sitting somewhat forgotten on my hard-drive for 10 years is long enough! The exploration was part of a weekend trip to the Izu Peninsula and I have to admit it would have been impossible to do without the help of a friend I was travelling with. The naval hospital was on the premises of a semi-abandoned hospital complex, part of which is still active to this very day… and the building of our interest was tightly locked. Fortunately there was a hole the size of maybe a tennis ball in the plastic part of the door, slightly off above the lock. Now, I’m a big guy with big arms and there was not a snowball’s chance in hell my hand let alone my arm would have fit through that hole – luckily my friend was a skinny woman who literally had a can of coffee and a cigarette for breakfast (guess which country she’s from!), so it took her about 5 seconds to unlock the door and get us into the building.

As beautiful as the semi-overgrown wooden structure was from the outside, the interior matched it – despite being rather cluttered, but not really vandalized. It clearly was an abandoned building used as a storage for medical devices and files no longer needed. Room after room there were items to discover and photos to capture – especially since I hadn’t seen any interior pictures before, so I had no idea what to expect. Old equipment, new equipment (some with screens!), and tons of stuff I had no clue what they were used for. After looking at the photos again, I have to admit that the exploration would have been much less exciting if I would have seen the same stuff in a regular abandoned warehouse – but we weren’t in an abandoned warehouse, we were in an abandoned 85 year old military hospital not a lot of people knew about! Upon leaving we made sure to lock the door again – the hole was later covered as I found out in 2023, when I was in the area again to have a look at the semi abandoned modern part of the hospital. Because back in 2015 we ran out of time and had to rush to the *Irozaki Jungle Park*, which was a unique exploration by itself.

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Pachinko Animal Farm

Posted in Abandoned, Animals, Asia, Chugoku, Farm, Food, Haikyo, Japan, Okayama, Pachinko, Photography, Travel on 2025/08/21| 6 Comments »

It’s summer and I can’t explore, so this month I’ll throw in a bonus location. It’s not a spectacular one, but they can’t all be…

Animal farms reek – even more so than Osaka, which smells pretty bad, especially in summer, especially after a shower of rain. But not as bad as cattle or chicken farms, which is why people live in Osaka and animal farms are banned to the countryside. Not even the regular small town countryside. Remote places halfway up a hill – out of sight, sound and smell of the local yokels who have to work there since the Japanese countryside is dying faster than poultry during an outbreak of the bird flu. I grew up in a pretty agricultural small town in Germany, I have relatives with a farm and restaurant in the Black Forest – despite living in the big bad city for the past 25 years I know what livestock smells like. But it’s nothing in comparison to the chicken farms I passed by in Japan. Holy crap, those things smell like sewage plants. Maybe worse. I guess it depends on the part of the sewage plant. Anyway, what I am trying to say is: Japan has tons of animal farms, you just never see them since they are tucked away in the countryside, far away from the noses of locals and tourists alike. Quite a few of those farms are abandoned – and this is one of them!
When I found the Pachinko Animal Farm it was nothing more than a rather random smudge on GoogleMaps, a blurry greyish-green blob indicating a couple of buildings in the middle of nowhere on the way to a rather famous abandoned hotel. I was on a no risk exploration day trip with three generations of Americans, age about 7 months to 70 years; obviously none of them were my family, but I’ve been exploring with my parents in Japan before, so I knew what kind of places to select. After a day of nice locations and surprisingly good beach hut pizza, we were about to check out said famous hotel to have a look from the outside when I realized that the Pachinko Animal Farm was basically on the way there, so we made a stop to have a look around. And what can I say? It wasn’t exactly the *Billionaire’s Villa*, but it wasn’t that bad either. Since it was an original find, it was first and foremost exciting, especially for my co-explorers. Okay, maybe not for the 7 months old, but the other ones! (And before some of you turn a lump of coal into a diamond with your butt cheeks: The baby never entered a building all day – no risk, fresh air. It was even fed outside… No child was harmed during any of my explorations ever!)
It looked like a mudslide damaged the stables, though it’s hard to say if that happened before or after abandonment. Probably after, given the cracked floors that reminded me of *an abandoned school that I’ve explored years prior*. Also completely unexpected: The dozen or so abandoned pachinko machines, most of them broken. They looked rather old, maybe from the 70s, and were probably just dumped there. I’ve never heard of a combined poultry/pachinko business before… So, yeah, a decent place to explore, nothing spectacular at all, but still better than nothing. Next week though… Boy, oh, boy… Next week’s location will be one of my favorite unpublished places. I’m looking forward to it. I hope you do, too!

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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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Kyoto Countryside Factory

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Factory, Haikyo, Japan, Kyoto, Photography, Travel, Urbex, Visited in 2014 on 2025/06/30| 3 Comments »

Driving around in the countryside is one of the best ways to find abandoned places in Japan that are not (yet) known in the urbex community – original finds. But you have to be careful or you might end up in somebody’s living room or at their work place…

In the mid-2010s I went exploring with two journalists from Scandinavia who did research for a book about abandoned places and industrial decay. On our way to a deserted hotel we drove past this wooden, rundown factory… and turned around to have a closer look. There were some cars with license plates parked on the premises, despite it being Sunday, but nobody was there. The place had a very abandoned look to it, but most buildings were locked and could have still been used, though we had no clue what for, so we took some photos, mostly outdoors, and drove on – breaking and entering isn’t my thing… and original finds are extra risky. I didn’t know until my research for this article that the company wasn’t officially shut down until two years after this exploration!
7 years later I was in that part of Kyoto prefecture again with another urbex friend, so we decided to stop by the countryside factory again. And this time it was completely different. All the cars were gone, about one third of the factory had been demolished, the rest was easily accessible through open or unlocked doors. This time we had to rush, because we were running out of daylight, but it was nevertheless a super interesting exploration as the factory looked like it must have been a hundred years old and could collapse at any time when slamming a door shut.

It wasn’t until selecting photos from both sets for this article that I realized how different the factory looked on both visits. During my first exploration I wasn’t sure about the status of the place, but when comparing those photos with the second set, it’s super clear that the factory was still in use during the first visit – electrical wires and other cables hadn’t been cut yet, some tables and areas looked like active workspaces, there was less vegetation… and of course the factory was still complete and not partly demolished.
Technically this is not one of the most beautiful photo sets I’ve ever published, but it’s an original find and Showa AF – maybe even Meiji. At the same time parts of the Kyoto Countryside Factory had almost a fantasy vibe, if you were able to ignore the computers and cables and plastic crates… I’ve been to more than my fair share of abandoned wooden structures, but this facility was huge and had hardly any metal elements. Even the small rail system had more wooden elements than metal ones and could have been right out of an 80s fantasy flick. So, yeah, even if the photos are not great, I really enjoyed exploring this place. Which is rare, as I hardly do revisits, despite the fact that this is the second location in a row with a combined gallery of two explorations. So next time I’ll post a one-off again. Which one? I don’t know yet, but you should definitely *check out some older locations*!

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Jumbo Club Lake Biwa

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Haikyo, Hotel / Ryokan, Japan, Kansai, Photography, Shiga, Travel, Visited in 2011, Visited in 2017 on 2025/05/29| 5 Comments »

People often ask me “How do you find all those abandoned places?” – and while I have many sources, it can be as simple as riding a mama-chari around Lake Biwa…

Back in the early 2010s, when we were all younger and life was much easier, I got often contacted by people who liked my blog. Some wanted to interview me, some fished for locations, and some wanted to meet up. It’s actually still the same now, I just made too many bad experiences since then with interviewers, location fishers and random people to engage much anymore in person. One of the nicer guys from back then was an assistant language teacher in the JET Programme (Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme) and uncharacteristically busy, so once we decided to finally meet, it took us a while to find a weekend when we were both free. He was joining one of those two day “bike around Lake Biwa” events (a much underrated alternative to the Shimanami Kaido) and invited me to join him and his fellows JETs, which I foolish did. Since I joined the group last second, all the rental bikes were taken, but my new friend, which I first met on location at the start of the tour, provided me with a slightly rusty mama-chari (also known as a Dutch bike or utility bike) several sizes too small. Which I didn’t realize, because I was such an inexperienced biker… I should have canceled the whole thing when I realized that with every half-turn of the chain ring one of my knees (almost) hit the handlebar. Now I’m glad that I stuck with it, but much of this story is infinitely better in hindsight than it was experiencing it. Long story short: I survived the 170 kilometers in two days, but after about half a day my butt felt like I was sitting on two chef’s knives, so whenever I even slightly moved, especially up or down, I was in excruciating pain I hadn’t felt before or after the botched in-eye lens operation (*more about that story here*).

When you are riding 170 kilometers through the Japanese countryside it’s almost impossible not to see some abandoned places. Usually old houses or sheds, places not really interesting even for intermediate explorers. But at a rather remote stretch of the course a “Do not enter!” sign at a fence that shouldn’t have been there in sight of a hotel in rather good condition caught my eyes. I probably would have gone right past the place, but that combination is rather unusual as the average hotel is very much interested in people entering as it is basically their business model. People entering… and staying. So we got off our bikes and our first exploration together became an improvised one of an original find – an omen of the many successful explorations we would be doing together in the years to come!
Unfortunately the good condition of the hotel prevented us from getting inside – all doors were locked, most of the windows were boarded up. Somebody put some effort into this. At the same time we risked being separated from the biking group, so we took a few quick photos and left… but of course that place stayed with me, especially since it was one of my first decent original finds. A really good one even, if accessible.
A few years later I was in the same area again with another co-explorer and his Nissan Leaf. Now, no disrespect to early modern electric cars, but that thing was… special. And 2nd hand. The range originally was about 180 kilometers and we started in Kyoto, but despite charging it during lunch break, we were running out of charge again quickly by the time we arrived at the Jumbo Club Lake Biwa. Afterwards, on the way back to Kyoto, we almost ran into serious problems as the net of charging stations back then wasn’t nearly as big as it is now – and we couldn’t use the first two or three which we found because of compatibility problems. We literally rolled onto a closed Nissan dealership to charge the car! With less luck we would have run out of energy somewhere in the middle of nowhere…

Fortunately the second exploration of the hotel was much more successful than the car ride… or the first exploration. While the hotel never showed up on any urbex accounts back then, apparently it was found by questionable characters who didn’t take the whole “breaking and entering” aspect as seriously as my friends and I… and so we got access through a door with a now broken lock on the back of the building. Already running out of light due to overcast weather the exploration had to be quick and efficient, but it was quite a beauty as far as hotels go, despite some mold here and there. My favorite part was the bar near the entrance… and of course the arcade machines on the second floor. A bit nerve-racking though as original finds are true explorations and you never know what you will experience.

Fun facts:
– Not too long ago and quite a bit after my second visit I once saw this place on Japanese Twitter, claiming it was a rich man’s villa on a private island.
– I didn’t know the name of the hotel until long after my second exploration, when I looked through some old photos of mine and saw it written on a sign at the entrance. And only then I also realized that it must have been a sister hotel of one of my earliest explorations, the *Jumbo Club Awaji Island*.
– I explored a third hotel of this chain and know about a fourth.
– The gallery includes photos of both explorations.

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Sega World

Posted in Abandoned, Amusement Park, Art, Asia, Haikyo, Japan, Photography, Travel, Urbex on 2025/04/22| 5 Comments »

Sega and Sonic are video game icons. Seeing them on the side of an abandoned 90s arcade building in Japan is as good as urban exploration gets!

I’ve been playing video games my whole life. One of my earliest memories is watching my mom playing Pac Man on an Atari VCS2600 in the living room. In the 80s our typical family vacation was spent in the southern part of Lake Garda in Italy – which means that I spent an hour or two every evening at a local amusement arcade (sala giochi), because in Germany arcade video game were usually in the same establishments as slot machines and therefore illegal to enter age 17 and below – mostly watching other people playing… or even the self-running demo mode, but as a child we were easy to entertain back then. My dad was a part-time programmer and full-time musician at the time, and an avid gamer, too, so there were always computers and game consoles at the house. In the early 90s I already bolstered my pocket money by distributing leaflets for local supermarket, so I convinced my dad to go half on a TurboDuo with an adapter for Japanese games – which meant having to buy expensive import games as the system wasn’t released in Germany at all, allowing me to play classics like Bonk’s Adventure, Gate of Thunder and Bomberman ’94 – while my friends at school argued whether Sega or Nintendo was cooler… Amateurs! 🙂
Three decades later I’m still playing video games occasionally, preferably on the Nintendo Switch as it is a portable system (to me, never hooked it up to a display – not once!). As a hobby, I spend much more time on urban exploration though, so you can imagine my excitement when I first heard of this abandoned arcade in the sticks. Not just any generic arcade. A Sega World arcade with the iconic font and a Sonic almost one storey tall! In combination with the pink and bright green stripes on the otherwise white exterior this building oozes quintessential 90s. So cool!

I guess it’s no surprise when I tell you that this Sega World was opened in 1994 – though it might sound unbelievable that is has been closed in 2009! 15 years and hardly any damage, except for some rust and as well as a few graffiti on the large windows.
Now the big two questions…
1) Was I able to get inside?
2) Were there still arcade machines inside?
The answers: Yes and no.
I was able to get inside, but there were no arcade machines or anything else removable of value left behind – my guess is that they moved the games and merchandising to another location when they closed shop. “Able to get inside” sounds like more effort than it actually was. The door was open. Literally. It didn’t even have to open it, it stood open and I was able to walk inside to take a few photos… after removing a large spider web, which tells me that there weren’t any other visitors here recently.
The interior of the building was in as good condition as the exterior. Some natural decay from 15 years without maintenance as well as a few graffiti, but nothing too bad. For the most you could still see the original design of the wall, which was part space, part Egyptian style… which I guess is quite 90s, too? There even was a stylized satellite contraption in the middle of the upper floor and hardly any mold, so as far as explorations go, this was a very relaxed one, despite heavy traffic on the road in front – spectacular outside, mildly interesting inside. Definitely one of my favorite locations of 2024, despite the lack of arcade machines. But if you are into those, who don’t you check out the articles about the *Arcade Machine Hotel* or the *Nishiwaki Health Land Hotel*?

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Frozen Country Club

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Golf, Haikyo, Japan, Non-Urbex, Photography, Ski, Sports, Tohoku, Travel, Urbex on 2025/02/26| 2 Comments »

Snow in November isn‘t really common in Japan, especially in southern Tohoku. But sometimes you gotta roll with the punches…

A few years ago I was on an autumn road trip to Tohoku, when I finally saw an opportunity to check out an abandoned country club that I had my eyes on for more than half a decade. Unfortunately it was so remote that I couldn’t explore it by myself due to the lack of transport, so I was really excited when I had the chance to go there. Several club houses, a hotel, a really big golf course, several other buildings – even a ski slope or two, as I found out afterwards. That thing was gigantic, potentially a whole day exploration! We stayed in a hotel about 20 kilometers away, maybe half an hour on countryside roads. It was overcast, maybe 15°C – typical autumn weather. When we left the plain to get into the mountains it suddenly become significantly colder, but who cares? That’s why we wore jackets. We took a final turn up a narrow road to the resort when all of a sudden the weather changed drastically – heavy snowfall, thick flakes. We went from zero snow on the ground to several centimeters in maybe half a minute. Nevertheless we pushed forwards, because you gotta seize opportunities when you have the chance! Unfortunately the resort was really big with lots of roads going all over the place, so we quickly lost track of where we wanted to go. You can look at maps all you want, when you go / drive up to an abandoned place, it usually looks different – it’s like Mike Tyson once said: Everyone has a plan ’till they get punched in the mouth. And the snow hit us hard. As it turned out we made it to the northwestern end of the premises with a large hotel, where half a dozen cars with license plates were parked. I got out of the car while my co-explorer turned around and slowly drove towards the entrance/exit as we both were worried that we might get stuck in the blizzard, given that the roads weren’t in great shape and we didn’t have winter tyres or 4WD. The hotel was properly locked up and the whole area wasn’t really explorable given the weather conditions, so I snapped a few quick shots before we got the hell out of Dodge and went on to greener pastures…

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Boobs Clinic

Posted in Abandoned, Hospital, Japan, Photography, Shikoku, Travel, Urbex on 2025/01/29| 4 Comments »

I love abandoned hospitals! Always have, always will – ever since I walked into the *Tokushima Countryside Clinic* about a year after I started exploring abandoned places. It wasn’t a standalone hospital as we are used to in the West, more like a traditional Japanese mansion with a pharmacy and a study and an examination room. Most of those clinics are basically the doctor’s home with a section for business – and I usually named them clinics here on the blog, while hospitals are standalone buildings with rooms for inpatients. *Hospitals here on Abandoned Kansai* also tend to be rather modern whereas most clinics are from 50s or 60s, some even pre-WW2, like the aforementioned Tokushima Countryside Clinic.
The Boobs Clinic (named after two pictures on a wall in the office, which hopefully were put up after the clinic closed – it wasn’t named that because it was home to a cosmetic surgeon, or any surgeon for that matter) in rural Ehime prefecture looked like any other house in the area, maybe on the larger side. If there had ever been signs that it was a doctor’s office, they had been removed a long time ago. At the time of my visit in late 2020 (exploring during the pandemic was the best!) it was just another house on the main road of a small town.
Since I wasn’t in charge of that trip, I actually had serious doubts when approaching the building, because it could as well still have been inhabited – and you really don’t want to walk into somebody’s home while the people living there are just minding their own business…
To be honest, this wasn’t a very memorable exploration. According to the photo data we were in and out within 45 minutes and the main reason I remember it, is because of the pictures I’ve taken – I actually had already written that I didn’t take any in the rest of the house, but then I checked the set to create a selection for the gallery of this article… and I had to rewrite this paragraph, because apparently I had taken a picture of the not so pretty living room. That being said, the whole building was in bad condition and partly falling apart, with the rest being moldy. A decent location worth stopping for for sure, but nothing spectacular when you have more than 10 years of exploring in Japan under you belt (at the time). In addition it was a very busy day with a total of four locations and hundreds of kilometers of driving, a lot on countryside roads through small towns. I hope you’ll enjoy the gallery, but there really is not much to say about this location as it is virtually unknown and exploring it was a surprise to me, too. My guess is that it was built in the 50s or 60s and provided care for the surrounding villages – handwritten patient files similar to those found in other clinics as well as various medicine and various medical instruments were all over the place, which was probably closed when the doctor running it retired or died. The end. Literally.

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Sapporo Dreamland (Teine Olympic Amusement Park)

Posted in Abandoned, Amusement Park, Asia, Haikyo, Hokkaido, Japan, Photography, Sapporo, Travel, Urbex on 2025/01/13| 7 Comments »

The demolition of Nara Dreamland in late 2016 / early 2017 was devastating, especially for explorers living in Kansai. Since then I explored several other abandoned theme parks, usually to leave disappointed. But now it’s time to introduce you to the Teine Olympic Amusement Park – or as I like to call it: Sapporo Dreamland!

To make one thing clear: Sapporo Dreamland has nothing to do with Nara Dreamland or its actual sister park, the 2002 closed and 2003 demolished Yokohama Dreamland. The term is just snappier and more memorable than the rather clunky official name Teine Olympic Amusement Park. And as much as I hate revealing too much about locations, this one is so big and so unique, you could probably find it via GoogleLens or some smartass on Reddit anyway. Needless to say that I also wouldn’t be able to write anything about the park’s history, little as is known anyway. So… let’s get to it.

I first went to Mount Teine in 2012, when I arrived in Sapporo a day earlier than my co-explorer for a *Haikyo in Hokkaido* road trip – to kill time I went to check out the *Mt. Teine Ski Lift* and *The Olympic Ruins Of Sapporo 1972* solo. On my way to the latter I actually must have seen the iconic blue Ferris wheel of the already abandoned Mount Teine Olympic Amusement Park, but I guess I was so focused on the task at hand that I didn’t pay attention to it. Or maybe I thought it was still active. Who knows? In any case, more than a decade ago I wrote freely about the previously mentioned locations and apparently neither me nor anybody else was like: But what else is nearby? Some time in the second half of the 2010s I heard that the bobsleigh goal of the Olympic Ruins was demolished in early 2017, so I had a look at Mount Teine again and made a note of that strange blurry blob of unmarked something nearby – and forgot about it again… until I saw some amazing photos of an abandoned theme park posted by a friend on Twitter. Now, I could have gone down the easy path and asked for the location, but I seriously HATE IT when strangers do that to me, so I hardly ever do it to my friends; maybe a handful of times in 15 years. Finding locations is part of the urbex experience, and exploring a location earned is so much more fulfilling than just going there like it was a tourist attraction on GoogleMaps. So I had a closer look at my map of unexplored potential abandoned places… and to my surprise the photos fit exactly to the former blurry blob of unmarked something, which was now displayed in much higher resolution! The goddamn thing had been right in front of my eyes for more than half a decade!

Now, Hokkaido isn’t really in day trip range from Kansai (though technically it is…), so it took me a while to get back up there, just in time before Covid hit. Not that it really mattered, because unlike most countries, there were hardly any travel restriction within Japan – getting in or out was a nightmare, but early 2020 till late 2022 was the golden age of domestic tourism in Japan. It was AWESOME! *I even wrote an article about it back in 2022.* (The only negative experience I made during that time was getting denied entry to the Pear Museum in Kurashiki early during the pandemic, long before the vaccine, as they restricted access to Tottori prefecture residents.) Anyway, a total of 7 years passed between my first and my second visit to Mount Teine… but it was really worth the wait as the abandoned Teine Olympic Amusement Park turned out to be Nara Dreamland 2. Maybe even better than Nara Dreamland 2, thanks to the park’s most iconic ride – a gigantic blue Ferris wheel at Plaza II!

At the time of being closed for good after the 2009 season, the entry fee to Sapporo Dreamland was 2500 Yen (an extra 300 Yen around Golden Week!). Due to cold weather at “best” and tons of snow at “worst” the park was only open from Golden Week till late September / early October, which is a very short season to make money. (Ski season on the same mountain is usually from late November / early December till late April, but you had to add a few more weeks to make the rides winter-proof / ready for operation.) It surely didn’t help that even during that time, the park was only open on Saturdays, Sundays, and national holidays – with the exception of summer school holidays, when the Teine Olympic Amusement Park was open every day. The place also had a reputation for being rather run-down and having occasional accidents, so it was probably good that they shut it down before something really bad happened, like at *Expoland*, where a student died due to a rollercoaster accident.

Speaking of rollercoasters – the park had two of them, though neither was modern, like the ones you might know from USJ or Fuji-Q Highland. In total there were 26 attractions, the latest being an area called Exciting Dinosaur Land (Wakuwaku Kyōryū Rando), constructed in 2004 – two or three dozen dinosaurs on about 500 square meters (sorry, I have no idea what’s that in Fahrenheit…) with some of them being parts of rides or slides. The dinosaur playground was located right between Plaza I and Plaza II, the two main areas of Teine Olympic Amusement Park, which were connected by a short path through the surrounding forest. The origins of the park date back to 1966, when Sapporo won the bid for the Olympic Games – six years before the actual event. The city was actually one of the few that really benefited from the Games as it managed to make a profit and also opened the first section of its newly built subway system, now consisting of three lines. Hence the nostalgia and bids for future games, despite the fact that those most likely will turn into a disaster, similar to Osaka and the Expo (1970 / 2025).

The first time I explored Sapporo Dreamland was back in 2019 on a rather unpleasant spring day – not only can you see patches of snow on some photos, but the weather was a bit windy and constantly changing between foggy, drizzly, and overcast. All the photos in the gallery below are from that visit, which took me about 2.5 hours – admittedly a bit rushed, but while I was in the Dinosaur Land, I got an excitement boost when seeing somebody driving around in a car, which brought back terrible memories from when I first explored Nara Dreamland almost a decade prior. Fortunately I was able to hide in the fog, but as soon as the car was gone I moved on to Plaza I, where I took only a few quick shots before leaving. The atmosphere there was mind-blowing though, especially when exploring solo and not knowing exactly what to expect. It is absolutely beyond me, why this location is not more popular and all over the internet. Even among Japanese urbexers it’s not even close to being Top 20 in my guesstimation, probably not even Top 50, despite being rather easily accessible. Nara Dreamland on the other hand was all over the web back in the mid-2010s, a few years after I started writing about it. I met more tourists at Nara Dreamland than Sapporo Dreamland most likely had explorers in total. Let’s see if that changes after this article. I kept my mouth shut for almost six years, but I wanted to celebrate the 15th Anniversary of Abandoned Kansai with a spectacular location – and on this day 15 years ago I published my (partly failed) exploration of the *Mount Atago Cable Car*, the first real article. Who would have thought that 15 years later I would still be exploring and writing about it? My first exploration of Sapporo Dreamland wasn’t my last, of course. Since then I’ve been back twice – once on a sunny late spring afternoon and once on a rainy autumn day. So if one or more of the international urbex tourists picks up on Sapporo Dreamland later this year, I’ll be ready with another article… and another article. And then I have another large, abandoned amusement park on hold – one I haven’t seen anywhere on any urbex site, not even Japanese ones. Not to mention all the other spectacular places I’ve been exploring. I kept quiet about Sapporo Dreamland for more than five years… Imagine what and how many other locations you don’t know about yet! 15 years into it and the best is still to come!

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Love Hotel Tiara

Posted in Abandoned, Japan, Love Hotel, Photography, Sex, Travel, Urbex on 2024/12/24| 2 Comments »

Love Hotel. Tiara. Snow. Abandoned. Vandalized. Yada, yada, yada…
Merry XXX-Mas everyone!
*More abandoned love hotels.*

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