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Archive for the ‘Olympia’ Category

Olympic Ruins Of Japan

Posted in Abandoned, Haikyo, Hokkaido, Japan, Nagano, Olympia, Photography, Sports, Travel, Urbex on 2024/07/24| 2 Comments »

A few days from now the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris will begin. A spectacle that costs about €9 billion – and probably will leave some abandoned places behind… like in Japan!

Japan’s history as a host of the Olympic Games dates back to 1964, when Tokyo was home of the Summer Games. Sapporo 1972 and Nagano 1998 followed with Winter Games, before the disastrous Tokyo Summer Games 2020 were held in 2021. Sapporo (who had won the bid for 1940, but couldn’t follow through for obvious reasons) remembers the 1972 games so fondly that there was a large campaign to get the games in 2030 – an effort that became rather unpopular quickly in the aftermath of Tokyo 2020. 2034 is still in talks, but extremely unlikely… Some politicians seem to cling to it, but that’s pretty much it.

Since I avoid Tokyo like the plague (or Corona… still no infection!) I don’t know what the status of their Olympic ruins is, but both Nagano and Sapporo still have some installations left. The Olympic bobsleigh track in Nagano called Spiral is a tourist attraction now (coordinates: 36.71088, 138.1578), the other remaining venues that have been abandoned are mostly forgotten now – some have been demolished after my visit, for example the bobsleigh goal house in Sapporo and that gymnasium used by athletes to change and prepare right before their competitions. I compiled a little gallery with some interesting photos at the end of this blog entry, but here is a list of links to the full articles I’ve written in the past, in case you want to see (and read?) more:
*Sapporo 1972 (1)*
*Sapporo 1972 (2)*
*Nagano 1998 (1)*

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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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Mount Teine Ski Lift Senshaku

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Haikyo, Hiking, Hokkaido, Japan, Olympia, Photography, Restaurant, Ski, Snow, Sports, Transportation, Urbex, Video, Visited in 2012 on 2013/01/29| 11 Comments »

When exploring abandoned places you are barely ever the first to visit, mainly because you have to find out about them somehow, which means that somebody had to write or tell you about them – so pretty much the best case scenario is that you haven’t seen too many photos and videos about a location before visiting it. That applied for most spots on my *haikyo trip to Hokkaido*, which is quite unusual, but Hokkaido isn’t exactly popular amongst foreign urban explorers (or Japanese haikyoists…) since it is rather off the beaten tracks. Those barely spoiled locations are especially exciting to explore, since there is only little known about them – how to get in, condition, size, dangerous parts, security…
Whether that’s a good thing or not lies in the eye of the beholder. I like my explorations with as little surprises as possible, to be honest with you, but at the same time I favor locations that haven’t been photographed to death; preferably places that are in the middle of nowhere with not a soul within a couple of kilometers. About 75% of the locations I visited in Hokkaido I knew little more about than their names and a handful of photos before exploring them myself – but the Mount Teine Ski Lift was special and stood out of even that group. Before walking up to the *Olympic Ruins Of Sapporo 1972* I had a look at the surroundings via GoogleMaps and saw a ski lift with two photos of abandoned constructions – but they weren’t named properly and I didn’t even know if they were just misplaced and in fact part of the Olympic Ruins. It turned out that they were a separate location, but although I know its name now researching it wasn’t exactly easy.

When I was walking up to the Mount Teine Ski Lift (which most likely was part of the still active Sapporo Teine Resort) I saw an old bus stop sign of the JR Hokkaido Bus line, although the staff at the JR Teine Station told me there were no busses running; maybe an old sign that was never removed… Not worthless though, as the sign had the name of the stop written on it: 千尺. The first kanji is common – sen, one thousand. But the second I couldn’t read, so I took a photo to find out later. Now I know that it means shaku, which is a traditional unit of measure in Asia, not in daily use anymore in Japan; about 303 mm or almost one foot. So the place was basically called “303 Meters”, although the slope was actually much longer; about 2 kilometers to be more specific. To get to the top you had to use two different lifts and it turned out that the mountain station of the second left was in proximity of the former start of the Olympic Bobsleigh track before it was dismantled, while the *Olympic Ruins Of Sapporo 1972* were the goal – it’s all connected…
If you google the term you’ll end up with links to the Gosenshaku Hotel, a rather high end accommodation in the Japanese Alps, about 1000 km away from the Senshaku ski lift. If you do some more googling in Japanese you might stumble across two year old photos on which the rest house is in way better shape. Now almost completely collapsed it was in decent condition just 24 months prior to my visit – and several (now unreadable) signs revealed more information; sadly the Japanese guys hosting those photos didn’t care to write anything about the place. It seems like the full name was “Teine Olympia Senshaku Highland”. Unlike the bobsleigh ruins, this ski lift didn’t show off the Olympic Rings, so it’s safe to say that it wasn’t part of the official venues; even more so since according to the Japanese Wikipedia the Olympia Highland was established in 1974 and opened in 1976, four years after the games were held. Instead it was a skiing slope for the general public – with lockers, rental gear, food and arcade machines. The chartered shuttle bus service was stopped in August of 2001 and 15 months later Kamori Kanko bought the place (they also own Noboribetsu Bear Park and Noboribetsu Marine Park Nixe near the *Tenkaen, Japan’s Lost China Theme Park*). And at that point I got lost a bit as I found contradictive information about combining two skiing areas, about places getting closed that still have active homepages, about areas that look the same, but have different names… Long story short: I still have no idea when Senshaku was closed!

All I know is that it was exciting walking up to the Senshaku area as I had little to no idea what to expect. While Sapporo itself was still basically snow free the 150 meters of additional elevation and not being in the city anymore made a difference of about 5 to 10 cm – just enough to be fun without being annoying. Of course a car was parked in front of the entrance upon my approach, but I decided to ignore the guy and just walked straight up the hill. I also ignored the mostly collapsed building to the left and had a quick look at the dilapidated ski lift to the right – being all by myself and already rather cold I refrained from climbing that death trap and made my way up the mountain to take some photos of the towers and to take some ultra-wide angle shots of the whole place. Up there I found a big cart with several ropes connected to it, probably used to transport goods up the mountain, though I didn’t find any information about it, even during the research I did for this article. While taking photos of the wagon I heard some wild noises that didn’t sound too friendly. I didn’t see any animals, but I wasn’t exactly eager to have any confrontation, so I grabbed my video camera and walked back down the hill. The video ended abruptly when I turned down the camera as soon as I saw a man standing between the lift and the rest house – preemptive obedience, Japan’s unofficial motto. It turned out that the guy didn’t mean no harm and just had a look himself, but it was good to stop anyway since him walking through the video several times or even talking to me wouldn’t have been good either. Obviously he wasn’t eager to talk to me… and left before I was done taking more photos of the ski lift.
The former rest house was in horrible condition and I only spent a couple of minutes exploring it – because it looked more dangerous than interesting, and because the sun was already setting behind Mount Teine and I still had to walk up the mountain to see the *Olympic Ruins of Sapporo 1972*…

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The Olympic Ruins Of Sapporo 1972

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Haikyo, Hiking, Hokkaido, Japan, Olympia, Photography, Sapporo, Sports, Urbex, Video, Visited in 2012 on 2012/12/11| 31 Comments »

Some locations just have a sound to them that is irresistible, places you want to visit purely based on their names. Like the *Abandoned Japanese Sex Museum*, *Nara Dreamland* or the *Zone of Alienation* – names that create images even without knowing anything about them. When I heard about the Olympic Ruins Of Sapporo I knew I had to see them at one point or the other. There have been only 21 Olympic Winter Games so far and although the ones in Sapporo were held 40 years ago I was stunned to hear that some of the locations were abandoned – which, admittedly, is kind of naïve given the fact that even some event locations of the Olympic Summer Games in Athens (2004!) are already abandoned!

Since my first day in Sapporo was surprisingly sunny and I had some time to kill till my fellow explorer would arrive, I took the opportunity to not wait for a second trip to Hokkaido and have a look at the Olympic ruins right away. Sadly the whole thing sounded a lot better in theory than it ended up to be…
First of all: The skiing season in Hokkaido starts in early December, but I was in Sapporo in late November – so there were no buses running, only taxis. When I told the (female) train station staff that I will walk instead I was taken away by a prime example of a typical wave of Japanese surprise and disbelief. Still hilarious even after six years…

5 kilometers, 400 meters altitude difference and 1.5 hours later (I took my time…) I finally reached the Olympic Ruins Of Sapporo 1972. In the 1972 Winter Olympics this area was the bobsleigh goal house – the track was constructed from reinforced concrete between October 1969 and January 1972 for 433 million Yen and highlighted by 127 lamps for night runs. After Nagano was rewarded the 1998 Winter Olympics the bobsleigh track in Sapporo (1563 meters long, 132 meters vertical drop, 14 turns) was dismantled in 1991, but the goal house wasn’t.
Since I was stopping by at another location first it was already getting dark by the time I arrived halfway up Mount Teine. The area around the bobsleigh goal house was covered by snow completely, making it difficult to approach safely and impossible to reach the back area and the green shack halfway up a slope. I was able to enter the basement though, where all kinds of crap and some heavy machines were rotting and rusting. Sadly I forgot my flashlight at the hotel, so I wasn’t able to enter the ground floor or the first floor, both in a quite dilapidated state anyway. It also made me hurry quite a bit so I would get back to civilization at daylight to limit the risk of breaking some body part due to black ice or getting run over by one of the few cars speeding up and down the mountain. Furthermore I am a jeans and T-shirt guy all year round, not well prepared for winters since there are no winters in Osaka… and it got pretty friggin cold up there after a while, especially after the sun was hiding from about 3 p.m. on!
So in the end it was a quick look at an unspectacular location, but I was able to take some photos of an abandoned building with the Olympic rings on it – and that made me feel like a winner!

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