An original find deep in the mountains, far away from home – and a rare kind of location: an abandoned garment factory!
Planning an urbex trip, even if it’s just for a day, is not an easy task, even if you can choose from dozens or even hundreds of locations. Do you go with established locations or do you risk original finds, which can be hit or miss? Do you choose clusters of mediocre places or is it worth driving an hour between locations? Do you choose high risk / hard to enter or rather low risk / easy to enter? Can you start early in the morning and plan till sunset or do you have to calculate for late risers and “But my partner wants me back by 6!” sleepyheads?
On an autumn day two years ago my friend *Hamish* and I came through a rather remote area of Japan, where I had marked an inconspicuous building on GoogleMaps I had found by chance and assumed was abandoned. Hardly any visual proof due to blurriness of the satellite view and lack of Streetview, but I had a strong hunch. So we did a minor detour to check it out. And what can I say? It was a surprise success! 🙂
It turned out that the unremarkable building was an abandoned garment factory. The largest space, most likely the main workshop, had been mainly emptied out, but there were several other rooms full of machinery, fabric, paper patterns, and documents! So much to see and take pictures of… And since I’m a rather slow photographer, Hamish finished before me and went back to the car, which we parked right in front of the facility on the slightly overgrown former employee parking lot. A carelessness that attracted the attention of the close-by neighbors after a while, apparently. I more or less had finished taking pictures of the main complex when I heard voices outside – we got caught! Sort of. Seems like there was a small festival taking place rather nearby (which we heard), so instead of calling the police, the neighbors called the local fire department to check out that car with the license plates from far away that was parked in front of the abandoned factory for a while. Assuming we were in trouble I left through the back door and approached my friend and the stranger from behind the building. Apparently the guy was quite nice and didn’t want to get us into trouble either, so we asked for permission to take photos – which he granted, but ONLY of the outside. No going inside… Of course not! As soon as the guy was gone I went back inside for the video walkthrough before heading for a small side-building, that unfortunately turned out to be just cluttered and rundown.
Overall a fantastic exploration on a warm, sunny autumn day – a rare kind of abandoned place, an original find in really good condition, great company, getting to know the locals… It’s close to impossible to beat that!
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Abandoned Kansai 