All abandoned: Chernobyl / Pripyat, Nara Dreamland, Anti-Zombie Fortress, Japanese Sex Museum – and many, many more! Plus: North Korea Special – 2 trips, 16 days / 14 nights! As seen on CNN…
I visited the *Japanese Sex Museum* for the first time in March of 2012 – it was not only a very unique exploration, it was also a very long one, me spending about 4 hours in the pitch-black exhibition rooms.
About 2 months later *I went to Kyushu and failed miserably* when I was unable to find a hotel room due to Japan’s wanderlust during Golden Week. I can be quite persistent, so I went back down south a week or two later to explore the northern Kyushu locations I was eager to visit for quite a while. This time everything went according to plan, so my tour ended in Yamaguchi prefecture with half a day to spare. So I jumped on a train and went back to the Japanese Sex Museum.
A ton of people watched the walking tour video I shot there, but while the feedback was generally positive, some viewers thought that it was way too short, being only 6 minutes long. Open for constructive criticism my idea was to go back to the museum, shoot a longer video and maybe take some additional photos. In and out in an hour, two tops – I had been there just recently, how much could have changed in less than 2 months? Well… I left after four hours to catch my last train back to Osaka!
Interestingly enough not a lot changed. The place looked almost the same, except for one minor difference – somebody opened two doors, emergency exits, allowing not only some foliage to enter, but also a few rays of light. Not much, but enough to use natural light with the help of a tripod and long exposure times for almost every single photo. During my first visit I had to illuminate about 80% of the photos manually and individually with a flashlight since it was completely dark in most of the rooms. On my second visit the process was almost as time-consuming as before, but the photos looked completely different, even when I took pictures of the same objects. And so one hour turned into two turned into three turned into four…
This is actually more or less a photo and video update since I already wrote about the sex museum’s history in my previous article – and since nothing happened while I revisited the place, here is the new material for your viewing pleasure without further ado. Enjoy!
The Saikaibashi Corazon Hotel Monorail is one of those surprise locations you stumble upon every once in a while. *A year ago during Golden Week* I was on my way to the *Saikaibashi Public Aquarium* and went down some steps minding my own business when all of a sudden I saw something overgrown through the bushes. At first I thought it was the entrance of the aquarium, but getting closer it was pretty clear that this was some abandoned transportation device. A red cabin with very dirty greenish windows. So my second idea (which lasted for the rest of the trip) was that this monorail granted access to the aquarium and therefore was somehow connected to it.
Well, I was wrong, in more than one way. First of all the Saikaibashi Corazon Hotel Monorail technically isn’t really a monorail, at least not in the modern way – it’s more like a slope car (スロープカー/ surōpukā), kind of a sub-category of modern monorails. At least the Japanese term is a brand name of Kaho Manufacturing, so it might not be the proper word to use either, but I guess we’ll go with it from now on.
Since I didn’t know what a slope car was I better give an explanation in case you don’t either. A slope car is a small automated monorail that provides accessibility for handicapped or elderly people, usually transporting them between entrance gates / parking lots / buildings by avoiding stairs at steep slopes. In 1966 Yoneyama Industry invented a fright-only monorail system to be used in mikan orchards (mikan are very delicious seedless and easy-peeling tangerines). A system to transport construction workers and lumberjacks was developed later, but it wasn’t until the 1990s when the system became popular for the general public when Kaho Manufacturing entered the market with great success in Japan and Korea, installing 80 slope cars of their Slope Car brand alone.
I don’t know when the Saikaibashi Corazon Hotel Monorail opened or closed, but I guess it was after 1990. In 1996 it was still operating as I found a report in Japanese written by a guest of the hotel. He was using the slope car at the Corazon Hotel not to reach the Saikaibashi Aquarium, which was already abandoned at the time, but to get to the waterfront below the hotel. From there guests of the Corazon Hotel were able to board a boat once or twice a day to get to the nearby and then quite popular Huis Ten Bosch amusement park, a Netherlands themed park; Nagasaki and the Netherland have a close common history of more than 400 years, sadly the theme park never lived up to that history and is in danger of becoming an abandoned place for about 10 years now – half its existence. I guess at one point in time after 1996 the boat connected to Huis Ten Bosch was cancelled and with that there was no use for the slope car (capacity: 12 people) since the aquarium was already close a long time ago…
Urban exploration is a dangerous hobby. How dangerous it really is I found out at the Daieikaku, a rather big abandoned ryokan south of Osaka. I was literally and figuratively one step away from my demise…
The Daieigaku was the first location Damon and I went to together back in 2010. Later we continued to explore the *Gion Love Hotel*, the Ferris wheel *Igosu 108*, the *K-1 Pachinko Parlor*, the *Tsuchikura Mine* as well as the *Kasuga Mine A* and *Kasuga Mine B* – but first the Daieikaku, a hotel that turned out to be quite hard to get to.
Back then I had done all my explorations using trains, but the Daieikaku was too far away from the closest station to walk to, so we had to take a bus. Which is a hassle in pretty much every country, especially if your command of the local language is… sub-par. Sometimes it’s close to impossible to figure out schedules and stops. When I wanted to get to a place near a university campus in Hokkaido last year it took the local tourist information at JR Sapporo Station 15 minutes to figure out which bus to take – and I knew the name of the bus stop I wanted to go to! Figuring out which bus to take to the Daieikaku wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t the only problem: The Daieikaku was located at a slope on the other side of a river, but the bridge leading to the ryokan was completely overgrown. Even in autumn with weakened flora we weren’t able to get to the other side, especially without being seen by locals and day visitors. So we crossed the river via another bridge, climbed up the slope and got to the back of the Daieikaku at the level of the third floor. Instead of taking some steps down to the ground floor we entered through a smashed in window right where we were. Starting up there was as good as anywhere else we thought…
Big mistake! The first room was one of those tatami party rooms you have in pretty much every hotel in Japan. Thanks to open doors and windows everywhere in the Daieigaku the place was in rather bad condition with leaves all over the place. I went to the side of the building, looking for a staircase. Found it, passed it and opened a door… a restroom. I went inside to have a closer look, but although the floor looked a lot more solid than the one in the tatami room it didn’t feel like it. Halfway into the room I had a very, very bad feeling, so I went back to the hallway, down one floor via the staircase, opened the door to the restroom below the one I just entered and… it was gone! There was no friggin restroom! Only one wall with some urinals hanging mid-air! And the bathroom I was in basically was attached to the rest of the building by its walls. I guess I don’t have to mention that the floors below were gone, too, so if I would have walked further into the restroom two minutes earlier (or probably just would have stayed where I was) there would have been a good chance that I would have crashed through a thin layer of tiles and wood three floors down to my death. After I recovered from that realization I went straight to Damon to warn him about the death trap on the third floor. Luckily he didn’t put himself in danger, so we continued our exploration without further incidents, although we continued to take risks every once in a while – especially Damon, who was exploring the hotel like a honey badger. Through tiny broken windows with shards left, up and down rotting wooden stairs, … Which lead us down to the onsen part of the ryokan, a part of the hotel I probably wouldn’t have gotten to if I would have gone there on my own, especially after that little shock right at the beginning. There we saw some major cracks in the ceiling and the wall, which didn’t exactly help to ease my mind – parts of the Daieigaku already collapsed, so being in the middle of the building with unstable floors above and below wasn’t exactly the place I wanted to be in. But the former lobby didn’t look any better. We first saw it from 2F and looked down – staircases gone, walls caved in… The whole building was in worse than dilapidated condition and I guess every single step could have been our last!
Looking back at the exploration of the Daieikaku I have to say that we were terribly naïve and really lucky. The term “Daieikaku” means big glorious building and it is often used for restaurants serving a charcoal grilled meat dish called yakiniku – and while the ryokan Daieikaku was indeed a big building it was everything but glorious. It was a deathtrap and by far the most dangerous location I have ever explored. It also was rather unspectacular overall, that’s probably the reason why I never wrote about it, almost forgot about. Back then I just did a pre-selection of my photos, deleting only the worst, so I had to go through almost 150 of them to make a final selection for this article – and it actually makes me wanna go back there. Three years ago I shot without a tripod and the Daieikaku was pretty dark in some places, though it was a bright and sunny autumn day. Furthermore several earthquakes hit Kansai since then, including the Tohoku Earthquake that caused the Fukushima Incident and a recent one that struck Awaji Island. Plus Mother Nature had 30 months to do additional damage… Well, we’ll see – if time allows I’ll stop by there again to give you an update on what happened to the Daieikaku. For now I hope you’ll enjoy the photos I took during my visit. I’m sure you are eager to see what the collapsed bathroom looked like… 🙂
Finding abandoned places can be a pain in the ass. Nowadays it’s either impossible to find places (because people don’t reveal names anymore, let alone prefectures or cities) – or you look at a map. Yes, there are more and more blogs with maps, revealing the exact locations of some of the best abandoned places in the world. I don’t like either approach very much as the first one is friggin’ teasing and the latter one contributes to the littering and vandalizing of once beautiful spots. Only a handful of serious people go through the time-consuming shenanigans of piecing information together, but that’s the way I prefer to do it…
Finding the Amano Clinic was a pain in the ass. I did some research on it more than 3 years ago and it took me ages to even pin down the area where the damn thing could have been. It was a famous ghost spot, so quite a few people wrote about the place (in Japanese…) – and everybody dropped another piece of the puzzle. After a couple of hours I concluded that the Amano Clinic must have been in a suburb of Yoshinogawa in Tokushima prefecture, a couple of hundred meters away from JR Awakawashima Station. Easy as pie from that point on, right? Wrong!
When Gianluigi and I arrived in Yoshinogawa (we thought) we knew the area the hospital was in and we (definitely) knew what the place looked like from the inside – but we had no idea what the hospital would look like from the outside! (Or if we really were in the right area…) So we parked the car and had a walk through the rural neighborhood. Up a hill we found an abandoned building… but it was just a barn with an office, not interesting at all. Heck, it was so uninteresting I didn’t even take photos.
So we kept on searching:
Cars? Not abandoned…
People? Not abandoned…
Neat gardens? Not abandoned…
Toys? Not abandoned…
Trimmed hedges? Not abandoned…
Laundry? Not abandoned…
After a while we found a house that probably was abandoned – we opened the door and Gianluigi fired the whole set phrase barrage about “Sorry, anybody home?”, which is an estimated 20 times longer in Japanese. Nobody was home and inside the place looked kind of abandoned, but we weren’t sure (not all houses in Japan are locked…). All we were sure of was that it didn’t look like a hospital or clinic, so we left quickly. In another part of the area we found some old-style storage buildings – raising our confidence that we were getting closer. A house close-by looked abandoned, too, but it was locked-up. So Gianluigi asked the neighbors who came back from grocery shopping and they gave us the final hint where the abandoned hospital was. Hallelujah, we didn’t waste valuable time hunting a ghost…
Like the *Tokushima Countryside Clinic* the premises were huge and overgrown. A bamboo forest turned out to be impenetrable, so we followed a surrounding path till we finally found a fence with a hole in it. We slipped through, made our way through a beautiful (and abandoned) Japanese garden and arrived at the back of a wooden house, abandoned for sure, but with an open door. Before we entered we cleared the surroundings and Gianluigi confirmed that we were at the right place when he saw the name written to the side of the building in gigantic but fading letters – Amano Hospital! Old style – in kanji, from right to left; which is quite unusual as nowadays Japanese texts are either written left to right or top to bottom.
Driving to the Amano Clinic took us several hours, finding it after parking the car took us about 60 minutes – exploring it and taking photos took us less than 20 minutes…
Since most of the windows were nailed up it was almost dark inside and the rotting floors / vandalized interior didn’t help either. The building might have had a history as a local doctor’s residence, but there was nothing left for us to see – it looked just like another abandoned Japanese countryside building, the most common and most boring *haikyo* there is.
A couple of months after exploring the Amano Hospital I read on a Japanese ghost spot blog that the clinic had been demolished. I tried to verify that statement for this article and found my old source again. This time I had a closer look at the text and it said that it is unknown when the Amano Clinic was demolished, but it was before the night porter’s house was torn down, which happened in late 2003. The problem is: Gianluigi and I visited the Amano Clinic in early 2011.
That can mean three things:
1.) The guy wanted to write 2011, but wrote 2003.
2.) The guy found another demolished building and thought it was the Amano Clinic.
3.) The Amano Clinic was demolished before 2004 and somebody nailed its sign to a regular old house – the one Gianluigi and I explored…
My guess would be #2, but I don’t know for sure, so contrary to my announcement in the *Second Road Trip To Shikoku* article I won’t add the Amano Clinic to my *map of demolished abandoned places in Japan* – just in case it’s still there… Sorry for that!
And with that you’ve seen all the locations Gian and I visited on our trip to Shikoku. Next week you’ll find out how I almost died while exploring an abandoned ryokan in Osaka prefecture…
The Kuroshio Lodge is one of the oldest and most famous abandoned places in Japan – even pioneer *haikyo* blogs who haven’t been updated in years feature this almost completely trashed hotel with the iconic bar; a beautiful photo opportunity thanks to its rusty stools and bright orange and yellow lamps. Nevertheless I struggled for about a year to find out where the Kuroshio Lodge was… and then another six months to find a ride as it is close to impossible to get to the place by public transportation – luckily it was *on the way to Shikoku* for Gianluigi and I, so we made a stop to stretch our legs and to take some photos.
Kuroshio means “black tide” and is also the name of a northeast-flowing ocean current stretching from Taiwan past Japan to the North Pacific Current – hence the nicknames Black Stream and Japanese Current, deriving from the deep blue of its waters and the country it flows by.
It’s pretty safe to say that the Kuroshio Lodge was named after the current – despite the fact that the Kuroshio (current) isn’t visible from where the lodge is located. The lodge on the other hand isn’t visible from the beautiful coastline of Awaji Island. You can get as close as 100 meters (beeline) on a busy street, look up a hill and see nothing but trees. At the same time you have a gorgeous view at the mountains of Awaji Island and the stunning Seto Inland Sea from the rooftop of the lodge… It’s all a matter of location!
At first and third sight the Kuroshio Lodge is a big disappointment. After huffing and puffing up a rather steep mountain road on foot, Gianluigi and I reached the back of the mid-size grey building. After years without maintenance the outside walls looked dirty, but that was nothing in comparison to what we saw when peeking through some open windows – the exposed rooms were filled with rotting vandalized futons and other interior. Not exactly a great start.
In close proximity of the abandoned hotel we found a couple of small houses at the slope; hut-sized, most likely the former living quarters of employees. We entered one of them, but the lighting in there was horrible and neither of us brought a tripod. There was not much to see anyway – I didn’t even bother to take a video.
Back up the slope we finally entered the Kuroshio Lodge – and were positively surprised by the lobby area with its famous turquoise chairs and the bar with its even more famous lamps and stools. You could take 100 interesting photos there and still won’t be bored!
Sadly disappointment stroke again right behind the counter. The kitchen next to the lobby / bar was completely vandalized and rotten, so we made our way up to 2F (first floor in Europe, second in Japan). No wonder that you barely ever see other rooms than the lobby when people post about the Kuroshio Lodge. The whole rest of the place was either vandalized and rotten or completely boring. I took a couple of snapshots here and there (like the lamp and the bath, although they were not really exciting subjects…) and then called it a day, taking the obligatory video on the way back to the lobby.
Since I visited the Kuroshio Lodge almost two years ago I found several Japanese articles about the hotel claiming that the area is overrun by wild dogs from a former dog breeder close to the hotel. They also claim that those dogs were involved in some rituals… whatever that means. Luckily I didn’t run into any mad dogs, crazy cultists or bloodthirsty sadists – although I remember seeing some kind of triangular sign on a metal plate in the boiler room (the one at the beginning of the video below, I just missed to catch the symbol on film… sorry for that, I didn’t think it was on any significance). The whole thing sounds a little bit like an exaggerated version of the usual ghost story surrounding basically every abandoned hotel in Japan. A lot of Japanese people are surprisingly superstitious, so whenever a place is abandoned you get some variation of the “owner committed suicide” story. Stories that are virtually impossible to verify. Nevertheless I thought I better mention the wild dogs. You know, just in case you walk up to the Kuroshio Lodge one day, get surrounded by them and think “Florian never mentioned those damn dogs!”…
To me the Kuroshio Lodge was a rather disappointing location. I loved the entrance area, but the rest of the building gave me a “been there, done that” kind of vibe – which is not what I was hoping for after putting so much time and effort into finding the place. But hey, what can you do? At least the bar and the lobby didn’t fail to deliver. And sometimes one room is all you need to make a visit worthwhile…
Daiwa Pottery or Yamato Ceramics?
Researching abandoned Japanese places can be a pain. Even if you have a name in kanji (those complicated Japanese characters that the island-dwellers use up to 20.000 different ones of…) doesn’t mean that you know how to pronounce it or do some research with it. In this case I found the name in kanji both on a chimney as well as written across the entrance of the main building – nevertheless I couldn’t find out anything about the company behind those characters; or how to read those characters as kanji can have several readings and meanings. Sure, I found a company of the same name in Osaka, but their logo didn’t match the one on the building I explored. I also found photos by two Japanese explorers, taken around the same time my buddy Gianluigi and I explored the factory – sadly neither of those fellow explorers put some visible effort into researching the history of the place; they just used the kanji they found written to name their pictures…
It got even more confusing at the end of the exploration when I took a photo of a piece of paper taped to the locked office door. Thanks to Gianluigi I know now that the sales team of the company moved to a different location in late 2006 / early 2007 – but on that sheet the name of the company was given as Daito, in katakana (those less complicated Japanese characters mainly used for foreign terms and to make terms stand out). So I did some research on the internet… At first without success, but then I found a Japanese page selling roof tiles, presenting some made by Daito. Full of excitement I sent the link to Gianluigi – who told me that I missed the top part of the page where it says that Daito went bankrupt.
So I guess the company started out as Daiwa Pottery / Yamato Ceramics, changed their name to Daito (maybe due to pressure from the Osaka company of the same name?), moved their sales team 7 years ago and went bust since then… which leaves me with a new abandoned place nobody knows about yet. 🙂
(BTW: The standard Daiwa Pottery / Yamato Ceramics roof tiles were 345mm by 345mm, weighed 3.6kg each and came in the colors Straight Black, Matt Brown, Matt Green, Metallic Black and Caribbean Blue.)
Exploring this abandoned tile factory was ill-starred anyway; mainly because it was only a matter of time until the stars were visible as *we arrived way behind schedule* at around 6 p.m. – sunset in early May in Japan, where complete darkness hits shortly after 7. An hour of twilight was all we got left, so we rushed through the backyard and the storage area below the main building first. By the time we actually entered the unlocked parts of the factory (another factory building was locked, so was the office) it was already too dark to take photos without a tripod – so I left it on the ground, on tables, machinery and whatever seemed to offer space. Exposure times quickly reached 30 seconds, so I hurried to take a flashlight assisted video before we finally ran out of time for good.
Like most last locations of a day the tile factory definitely deserved another hour or two, preferably with better lighting conditions. But well, what can you do? If I ever come to that area again I’ll make sure to revisit the place as it was a lot better than the few decent photos indicate. And I’ll stop by the now closed “new” sales office, maybe I will be able to find out more about the company’s history – or at least its name…
The Sudden Stop Syndrome is a widespread phenomenon in Japan. When you least expect it, people just stop walking without any warning signs. Half a meter in front of an open train door (even after lining up for minutes!), 5 cm inside of a train (basically in the middle of the door), at the end of elevators, moving walkways and steps, or right in front of you just as you walk down a street. No slowing down, no looking over the shoulder – just a sudden stop as if they were the last person on the planet. So far no deadly incidents have occurred, but there is always the risk of bumping into somebody… The worst part about it: There is no treatment and it can happen to everybody at any time. I don’t know how widespread the Sudden Stop Syndrome is in your country, but in Japan you most likely will observe it at one point or the other. (And by that I mean “at least weekly”.)
I wonder if the Sudden Stop Syndrome was known to the doctor(s) running the Tokushima Countryside Clinic (TCC) from as early as the 1930s on. Probably not. I imagine back then the times were less rushed – and the slower you walk, the less sudden a stop is.
The Tokushima Countryside Clinic is without the shadow of a doubt one of the best abandoned hospitals in Japan, probably in the world – although “hospital” and “clinic” are words that are used rather loosely in Japan.
When I hear the terms in English (or my native tongue German) I imagine rather big health care facilities with several doctors and departments; buildings for dozens or even hundreds of patients and inpatients. In Japan basically every family practice is called a clinic – but even some hospitals can host only a handful of inpatients and close on the weekends. Clinics are usually named after the doctor who owns and runs it, or by the town they are in.
The spookiest hospital I’ve ever been to is the *Hospital #126 in Pripyat*, abandoned in the aftermath of the *Chernobyl Disaster* – a big hospital with several floors and never-ending hallways, with paint flaking off the walls and wind making scary noises; just right out of a horror movie, though reality probably was scarier.
The Tokushima Countryside Clinic on the other hand offered quite a different experience. Located in a small town in the countryside of Tokushima prefecture it once were the rather big premises of the local doctor; half private house, half clinic. Even without the medical equipment it would have been a gorgeous example of an early modern Japanese estate, built about 100 years ago – most likely earlier.
Hidden in the backstreet of a side street in a tiny town the Tokushima Countryside Clinic really is off the beaten tracks and for years it was one of the most secret abandoned places in Japan. Although deserted more than 30 years prior to both of my visits (November 2010 and April 2011) the clinic was in amazing condition – you can find out a little bit more about the clinic’s history *in the article about my first visit*.
Being at the TCC you actually breathe history. The amount of books, chemicals and equipment left behind is amazing!
On one photo you can see containers of Risoban plaster. “Medical use, “Ideal adhesive plaser”, “Trade mark” – probably high-end when bought, but completely unknown to the internet today.
Oude Meesters on the other hand is still in business. The South African company with the Dutch name is famous for its brandies and actually still uses the same logo you can find on a bottle of Villa Rosa in one uf the photos – putting it dangerously close to containers filled with chemicals probably wasn’t a good idea though.
A box of “Koyamas Safe Pessaries” has written Osaka Juzen Hospital on the side – don’t get your hopes up, that’s not the real name of the Tokushima Countryside Clinic, it’s the hospital Dr. Sakae Koyama was the president of when he developed his birth control method: Koyama designed the conical shaped soft rubber diaphragm, patented as “Koyama Suction Pessary”, first and foremost out of personal motivation as him and his wife were parents to 12 children. The doc made history when he tried to market his invention in the States and the pessaries were seized by the customs as birth control was illegal in the United States in the early 1930s – that lead to a couple of lawsuits legalizing the trade of contraceptives in December 1936.
And the list goes on… and on… and on. Somebody should actually get all the stuff inside of the Tokushima Countryside Clinic and rebuild it as a room in a museum. I think you could spend weeks or months researching all the items in this wonderful family practice, spanning about 50 years in six different decades, maybe seven.
During this two hour long second visit I didn’t even enter the living quarters of this stunningly beautiful mansion – so you have to *look at the previous article* for photos of that part. And like in the article about my original visit I will publish the photo set in monochrome as it adds so much to the atmosphere in this case. I didn’t think much about the TCC recently, but when I went back to the photo set and my notes to write this article I got all excited about it again – some of the pictures actually gave me goosebumps and I hope you’ll enjoy them as much as I do.
One of my favorite things about urban exploration is travelling. Most of the time I do day trips within Kansai, but every couple of months I go on mini vacations to other regions. *Okinawa*, *Kyushu*, *Hokkaido*, *Shikoku* … and a couple of more that will be revealed in the future.
I lived in Japan for several years before I started to visit abandoned places – and in those first years I barely travelled within Japan. Kansai has plenty of castles, temples and shrines, some of the most famous in all of Japan. More than enough to get templed out, shrined out and castled out, so I didn’t feel the urge to spend hundreds of bucks on train tickets – and then a similar amount on hotels. Only to see more castles, temples and shrines that look similar to what I can see down the street. Abandoned places on the other hand are unique – and some of them are actually worth spending a couple of hundred bucks, at least to me.
The spring of 2011 saw my second overnight trip to Shikoku. *During the first one* my favorite location on Japan’s least populated main island was the spectacular *Tokushima Countryside Clinic*, a small town doctor’s house, barely harmed by vandals and the ravages of time. My friend Gianluigi, an avid photographer for almost two decades, loved the photos I took at the clinic, so I convinced him to go on a road trip – I would show him that wonderfully spooky gem if we would stop on other abandoned places along the way…
If you are a regular reader of Abandoned Kansai you might remember two articles I wrote about really unique haikyo about half a year ago – the abandoned Japanese spa *Shimizu Onsen Center* and the giant Buddha statue / viewing platform *World Peace Giant Kannon*; both of them were actually part of this second trip to Shikoku.
So here is a complete list of all the locations: Amano Hospital Daiwa Pottery Kuroshio Lodge Shimizu Onsen Center Tokushima Countryside Clinic Revisited World Peace Giant Kannon
One of these places has been demolished since I visited it two years ago – you’ll find out soon which one… and then I’ll add it to my *GoogleMap of Demolished Haikyo*.
I love the Toyoko Inn hotel chain in Japan. Their prices are fair, they are located right next to bigger train and subway stations, they offer free breakfast from 7 till 9.30 and free WiFi / internet 24/7, their staff usually speaks at least a little bit of English, they have a discount and point system for members – and you can make online reservations via their English homepage.
One reason I was hesitating to go on a trip *as mention in the previous blog post* was the fact that I was in-between credit cards for a couple of weeks. (In my experience it’s close to impossible for foreigners to get a credit card in Japan – but I am looking forward to the comments of every expat who got one… I know people who were rejected more than half a dozen times, I tried it once or twice and then got one in Germany…) But you need a credit card to make an online reservation at a Toyoko Inn – or so I thought.
When it was clear that I would spend the first night of my trip in Nagoya I stopped worrying. Last weekend wasn’t a typical time to travel in Japan (unlike *Golden Week*) and Toyoko Inn has six hotels in Nagoya, eight if you count the ones close to the airport – I was sure I would get a room somewhere. So the plan was to show up at one of them and ask the staff to make a reservation for me for the second night, which I planned to spend in Matsusaka – a town famous for its high quality beef, which turned out to be more dead then the cows it is famous for.
Luckily my plan was a good one, so I checked in at the hotel of my choice in Nagoya and asked the staff to call their sister hotel in Matsusaka to get me a reservation for the following night since I didn’t have a credit card. The friendly lady at the counter pointed to the opposite wall across the lobby and asked me to use the internet to make the reservation myself. I repeated that I didn’t have a credit card and therefore couldn’t make the online reservation. The answer was “You don’t need a credit card to make an online reservation.” – so I told her that I needed one when I tried to make one the night before. Since the hotel receptionist insisted that I wouldn’t need a card and was eager to show me that she was right we started the procedure on their English homepage – as usual. Another guest arrived so I filled out the form, scrolled down and… there it was, the section for the credit card information. I left it blank, tried to continue and of course it didn’t work and I got an error message. When the receptionist showed up again she seemed to be very surprised, switched the language settings of the homepage to Japanese and… finished the reservation without having to enter credit card information! She didn’t even have to log out / start the procedure from the beginning, she just switched the language settings and pressed a button to finalize the reservation.
I totally understand that hotels need some kind of security when people make online reservations and that’s the reason I never had a problem entering my credit card information when making an online reservation at a Toyoko Inn, 15 times for trips in 2012 alone. In fact they don’t charge your credit card and you can pay cash upon arrival, it’s just a security measure for no-shows, which I completely understand. Nevertheless I am kind of irritated by the fact that you have to put in your credit card information when you make the reservation in English, but not when you make it in Japanese – to me it implies that Toyoko Inn considers people who prefer to make reservations in Japanese more reliable than people who make reservations in English; which could be considered borderline racist. Again, I understand that (most) online hotel reservations require credit card information. But either it’s a general requirement for Toyoko Inn or not – doing it on the basis of the language chosen on the homepage feels wrong to me, as it means that not all customers are treated equally.
What do you think? „WTF?“ or “WTF!”?
(To end this posting on a lighter note I’ll add some non-urbex photos and videos I took during my three day trip. Inuyama Castle, Tagata Shrine Festival, Mount Gozaisho, Yunoyama Onsen, Toba, Iruka Island, Ise Shrine, … If anybody is familiar with dolphins please have a look at the video and let me know what you think – to me it looks like the poor creature was desperate to get away as it repeated the same motion at the “prison gates” to the ocean over and over again; I didn’t watch any shows on the island and didn’t spend any money there – Iruka Island (iruka = dolphin) was an optional stop on a harbor cruise I took in Toba.)
One of the trends during the Japanese Asset Price Bubble of 1986 to 1991 was building company retreats – on top of mountains with stunning views, in old onsen towns, along the coast. Regular trips for team building in addition to the weekly drinking nights were a given anyway, so why not go all in and build a weekend house with the company logo on it? It surely was a lot more prestigious than sending the staff off to a ryokan or a hotel. As soon as a company had a couple of hundred employees it also had a more or less big and luxurious house somewhere; and not only companies – universities and private high schools, too. Some of those buildings were small wooden huts for 6 to 8 people, others were kind of company hotels with (part-time) staff, taking care of chores like cooking, cleaning and gardening. Most of them were for class trips, department vacations and team building events – others could be booked like a hotel with internal company credit.
As we all know the real estate bubble burst and the Japanese economy began to struggle. It actually still does, probably more than ever since World War 2. Over the past 10 to 15 years a lot of those relaxation retreats became too expensive and were just abandoned; because the company went bankrupt or because it couldn’t afford the running expenses anymore and wasn’t able to sell the property.
In 2012 I visited about 100 abandoned places in Japan and Germany and I had quite a slow start into 2013 – the weather wasn’t exactly great and I felt a bit exhausted. Last Thursday I had to make a decision whether to go on a (non-urbex) trip for three days as I wanted to see a shrine festival near Nagoya, but I still felt tired and worn out by one of those colds that get you in Japan every couple of weeks in winter, since most companies don’t have sick days and therefore people drag themselves to the office instead of taking a paid day off. It was on that Thursday morning when I found two extremely motivating comments by Nikki praising the last two photo sets I published – and while I appreciate every comment (especially the positive ones! :)) it was the timing of those two that gave me the final push to see Inuyama Castle, attend the Tagata Shrine Festival, take the gondola up Mount Gozaisho, do a boat trip from Toba to Iruka Island and finally pay a visit to the famous Ise Grand Shrine. Although I knew that there were abandoned places near all of those locations I didn’t do much preparation as I wanted to experience Japan again the same way I did when I fell in love with it – as a tourist, doing touristy things.
While I was walking along a countryside road on one of those three days, minding my own business, thinking about this and that, I saw a house with an open door from the corner of my eye, MISATO.TENNIS.CLUB written in neon green letters above it. If the door would have been closed I probably would have passed by as the building was in good condition and there was nothing unusual about it. But an open door and neon green letters… who knows?
So I turned around and had a closer look. While I was entering I was trying to remember simple phrases in Japanese, like “Excuse me, do you know where can I buy something to drink?”, just in case I would run into somebody – but nobody was there. From the outside the building looked like a normal single-family house, but the entrance area and the name above the door made it pretty clear that it was one of those company vacation facilities.
Since I have never seen the Misato Tennis Club Lodge anywhere on the internet I tried to be as careful as possible. Original finds are always especially exciting to explore, but this one was in exceptional condition – no graffiti, no vandalism, barely any signs that the place was really abandoned. The saddest thing about this lodge was a dead bird I found in the hallway of the upper floor. Other than that it was a clean place with lots of stuff left behind – like the model of a boat on the counter at the entrance, lots of plates near the kitchen and plenty of furniture. With a couple of cleaning products you could make that place ready for occupancy within a day! (I guess that’s what the Misato Tennis Club is thinking, too, as I found a completely faded sign with a phone number outside…)
I had been to similar places before (although I haven’t written about them yet), so I didn’t take a lot of photos – especially since I didn’t bring my tripod and the lighting conditions inside the building weren’t always great. But it turned out that the lodge was full of lines and fascinating details. Well, at least fascinating to me. If you want to see what the place looked like in general I recommend to watch the video – the photo set mostly shows those details I was strangely attracted to; in that regard the lodge reminded me of the *Takarazuka Macadam Industrial Plant*. All of the photos I took were taken freehand within 30 minutes. And while not all of them turned out the way I hoped others still put a smile on my face. So much that I had to write about the place right away, although it really wasn’t that spectacular. But it was an original find in great condition, a rare combination nowadays, where you have more urbex blogs than abandoned places…
The downside of an original find is that it’s close to impossible to find any information about it. The Misato Tennis Club Lodge could have been abandoned a year ago, maybe five; maybe it just wasn’t used during winter and somebody forgot to close the door when he had a look at what to fix for the new season? Some places in Japan go to shit in a heartbeat, others look barely touched after 30 years. In this case one to three years kind of sound reasonable, the remote location being the reason why it was spared by vandals. (There actually is a Misato Tennis Club in driving distance of the lodge – and like I said, their phone number can be found on a sign outside. They have locations in Yokkaichi and Suzuka, and about a dozen trainers; including head coach Robert “Bobie” Angelo, a Davis Cup player from the Philippines.)
I always try to be as respectful as possible when exploring an abandoned place, but I think this time I didn’t even leave footprints… I actually wiped off my shoes on the doormat before entering! Like all exceptional original finds the Misato Tennis Club Lodge will forever have a special place in my heart and I really hope it will find a new owner before it falls victims to vandals or the forces of nature.
Abandoned Kansai 