There is probably no cheaper and more desperate cry for attention than slapping the Ghibli label onto something – and yet there have only been a few abandoned places I’ve been to that deserve this label more! 🙂
It was on a cold autumn morning when I found myself deep in the mountains of Shimane after a 5 hour long drive that started in the middle of night. If you would have told me that I was the first Caucasian to ever come through this little town, I wouldn’t have been surprised. I probably also was the second one when I came back almost 10 years later. Strangely enough those are the places where I feel comfortable the most. After almost 20 years in the big city I loathe places like Tokyo and Osucka more than ever, though that feeling caught me pretty quickly after moving to Japan. Unfortunately that’s where the jobs are, especially for foreigners, so the countryside as a place to live will have to wait until retirement… For now rural Japan is for the weekends – and by God, this was as rural as it gets. I actually had no idea where I was exactly until I paid attention to road signs on the way back since a friend was driving, but I was excited to be far away from grey skyscrapers and miserable suit wearers – and a bit disappointed when my friend pointed towards the rundown ryokan behind as. Apparently this was the main attraction of the day. Really? We must have passed about half a million abandoned places in those 5 hours. Did we really have to continue through the night to this one? Well, as it turned out, yes, we really did!
One thing I learned rather early on at the *Deathtrap Hotel* was that you never ever enter an abandoned building on a higher floor – you enter as low as possible, because otherwise you never know what’s underneath your feet. Much like the Deathtrap Hotel, the Ghibli Ryokan was built onto a slope – and my friend headed straight to the top for an easy entrance away from the “main street”. Well, his decisiveness implied that he knew that he was doing – and he learned it the hard way, as I found out later while exploring the building. At first we took pictures of the upper part, but when we made our way down, he told me: “If you want to go to the kitchen there on the lower floor, don’t take the small wooden stairs – go left and then right, and take the staircase that the guests used! The wooden stairs are not good anymore…” “How do you know?” “I crashed through them when I came here first. This is my third visit.” Well, there you have it…
The building itself, despite being pretty rundown, was just awesome to explore, because it wasn’t one of those generic hotels with a main hallway and rooms to the left and the right. It looked like it was expanded at least once, maybe two or three times, and you never knew what to expect behind the next corner… and there were plenty of corners! Probably more corners than rooms. One of which was the home to a large butsudan, a Buddhist altar usually found in private homes. Thinking of it, this might actually have been the private area of the ryokan owner… In any case, it was spectacular, and I’ve never seen anything like it before or after! Also really cool: The lobby and the bar of the ryokan, both Showa AF! Urbex at its best – time travel via natural decay. Well worth driving 5 hours there… and then back again.
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Abandoned Kansai 