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Archive for the ‘Sports’ Category

Sprungschanze Katzenbuckel

Posted in Abandoned, Baden-Württemberg, Europe, Germany, Ski, Snow, Sports, Urbex on 2025/03/25| 3 Comments »

In the 1990s ski jumping was super popular in Germany thanks to successful athletes like Jens Weisflog, Dieter Thoma, Martin Schmitt, and Sven Hannawald – major events were even broadcasted on popular TV stations. Kind of a surprise to me as it is a sport hardly anybody actively does themselves – every kid plays soccer at one point, maybe not in a team, but in school or on the street. But who actually does ski jumping? Only a few thousand people worldwide. In the past 20 years interest went down a bit, despite actives like Severin Freund and Andreas Wellinger continuously being successful. In addition to dwindling interest, climate change is a threat to ski jumping as it has left some ski resorts and ski jumping hill without enough snow to run them with financial success.

The 624m high Katzenbuckel (which translates to something like cat hump) is the highest peak of a lovely low mountain range full of history called Odenwald, roughly stretching from Darmstadt to Heidelberg (north/south) and to Wertheim in the east. In 1949 the Skizunft Katzenbuckel (skiing guild Katzenbuckel) was founded, a year later the first ski jumping hill was constructed, which allowed jump of up to 15 meters. The hill was steadily enlarged and 10 years the length of the original jumps was more than doubled. In 1976 a brand-new ski jump was built, including a 17-meter-high tower. Fueled by the German jumping success of the 90s a new plastic covered ski jumping hill with a steel tower was inaugurated in 1995 – also featuring two junior hills for young talents. It’s a bit unclear when the Schanze was finally closed – there are several reports from the 00s about activities there, but it seems like they started to fizzle out in the 2010s. If not dead already at the time, Corona definitely killed it as there are plenty of reports about the abandoned Schanze from 2020/21 on, when hiking became a popular activity during the years of social distancing. Those reports mostly were from local hikers, not urban explorers… so depending on which group you are looking at, I was either rather late or perfectly on time to the party, which I am fine with, given that I wasn’t able to go back home to Germany for several years.

Exploring the Katzenbuckel-Sprungsschanze was super easy and became a little family event. There was a free parking lot for hikers and other nature lovers just a few hundred meters away, which brings me to why I’m rather open with information about the Schanze: It was probably the busiest place I’ve ever explored due to two hiking trails running through – one behind the tower, one through the landing area. Even on a cold and damp winter day there were several dozen people walking past or through, some also had a closer look. Outdoor explorations far away from civilization are among my favorites, so despite the weather I really enjoyed this one… especially after exploring half a dozen ski-jumping hills in Japan, for example the *Overgrown Ski-Jumping Hill* and the spectacular *Hokkaido Ski-Jumping Hill*.

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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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Japanese Alps Country Club

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Golf, Haikyo, Japan, Photography, Sports, Travel, Urbex on 2024/10/30| 2 Comments »

You’d think that (almost) flat land in the mountainous center of Japan is so rare and valuable that every bit of it is used for housing and farming… but I guess there is always enough space for yet another country club!

Abandoned country clubs / *golf courses* are among the trickiest places to explore. They tend to consist of large areas of well-kept, rather flat ground, which means for the first few years of abandonment they tend to not look very abandoned as it takes some time for nature to take over – and usually real estate companies are rather quick to snatch up the land and sell it to some solar farm. I’ve been to several dozen closed / abandoned places like that all over Japan – 60% of the time they have been fenced off and turned into something useful (the Japanese government loves to play the a$$hole and officially sticks with nuclear power in one of the most earthquake and tsunami prone areas of the world, but in reality there are gigantic solar parks everywhere from Okinawa to Hokkaido!), but 30% of the golf courses still looked too new. The hedges were still in shape, the holes still recognizable, the club house still inaccessible. Maybe 10% were actually fun to explore, the remaining 90% not so much… a mixed bag at best, but often just a waste of time.

The Japanese Alps Country Club was definitely in the latter group of 90%, but within that group among the better locations. Pretty much all buildings on the premises had already been demolished, but the construction of the solar park hadn’t begun yet – machinery and some material was already there though. So I had a look around, enjoyed the beautiful views on this gorgeous spring day during sakura season, took some photos… and even found a few (inaccessible) bungalows on a slope, probably for guest golfers on vacation from far away. A relaxed exploration of a slightly disappointing location, nevertheless not a waste of time at all. Being in the middle of nowhere in Japan on a sunny day is always a win in my book.
And if you want to see an abandoned country club with golf karts (on a rainy day) I recommend checking out the *Countryside Golf Course*. It’s been a while since I published that one…

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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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Hiroshima Sports Hotel Revisited

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Haikyo, Hiroshima, Hotel / Ryokan, Japan, Photography, Sports, Travel, Urbex on 2023/05/31| 5 Comments »

The first time I visited the *Hiroshima Sports Hotel* it had a reputation for being under close surveillance of the surrounding country club – tough to get in and out. While it wasn’t exactly tough to get in, I still believed the story and barely dared to step outside to take pictures of the pool and the tennis courts, so I was stuck with a mediocre abandoned hotel that was completely overhyped. I hardly ever do revisits, except for *Nara Dreamland* back in the days, so I closed that chapter and hoped that I would never be reminded.
About 5 years and a case of arson later I found myself in front of the goddamn place again – with a different group of friends who never had been there before, which boggled my mind, because they just introduced me to an amazing abandoned hospital I didn’t even know existed. I had no intentions to waste just a single second on that piece of shite hotel, but I couldn’t really say no as I was still high on gratitude. Despite the flaming incident the reputation of the place apparently hadn’t changed (amazing, but hard to enter), so my friends were super excited, and I couldn’t break the news to them that we were about to waste a precious afternoon far from home. Upon arrival we saw a guy sitting in front of the road leading up to the hotel, apparently guarding it. The little devil on my shoulder was like “Perfect! Let’s use that guy as an excuse to bolt and explore a way more interesting location instead!” and my (Japanese) friends started to slightly panic, instantly trying to scout alternative ways in; which didn’t exist. I knew that because I’ve been there before. So I listened to that stupid little angel on my other shoulder and stopped my friends before somebody broke their ankle or sprained their neck (or the other way round…) and introduced them to the concept of gaijin smash. I’d walk up to and past the guy with a friendly konnichiwa on my lips and then head straight for the hotel. If he was in fact a guard, I’d play the stupid bumbling gaijin who doesn’t understand a word or the situation – if he was cool my friends should follow right behind me. And what shall I say? I smashed the situation and got us all in without sliding down a barely angled 5-meter-tall wall none of us would have been able to climb up again… and at the same time ruined the rest of my day.

While I must admit that the second exploration of the *Hiroshima Sports Hotel* was quite a bit more interesting than the first one (the arson added to the atmosphere and I went outside without caring about getting caught), it was still a boring AF experience. I didn’t even go upstairs and stayed on the entrance level and downstairs again. 5 years of additional decay (and vandalism) made some spots more interesting, so I was able to take a few cool photos, but again: hotel, revisit, exiting morning. BORING! Almost two hours later my friends finally had enough, and I was finally free to leave – just in time for sunset, ending this day of explorations. A glorious day overall that would have been better without this surprise revisit, but sometimes you gotta be a team player – especially in the land of shoganai…

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Trump Golf Resort Japan

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Golf, Haikyo, Japan, Photography, Sports, Travel, Urbex, Visited in 2017 on 2023/03/16| 4 Comments »

I admit, the last two locations and articles were a bit dull, so let’s strike back bigly with… oh… goddammit… an abandoned golf course? Really?

First of all: The Trump Golf Resort Japan has nothing to do with former US president Donald J. Trump or anybody in his family. I named it that, because it was rather close to the abandoned *Trump Hotel* – which also had nothing to do with that clan. When you google the name of this article, the Mobara Country Club in Chiba prefecture pops up, because Trump played golf there with Shinzo Abe in 2019 – needless to say that it also isn’t related in any way to this article, neither is the Kasumi Country Club, where those two big shots played in 2018. But when I think of golf resort and abandoned, I think of Trump… with a fox in the distance.

Anyway, the Trump Golf Resort Japan was an original find, so don’t expect to see it very often on the interwebs, weebs. It consisted of a 9-hole golf course and a driving range… but no hotel, so I guess the name is a bit of an exaggeration, although there was a large apartment building with a restaurant right across the street – so I guess it’s kind of appropriate in a weird way? Anyway, tiny golf course, tiny hands; but big boy golf, not mini golf!

The main building was rather unspectacular – a medium sized house with a bar and changing rooms, nothing too fancy. Moss and other plants had already taken over, but this probably could have easily been converted into a nice bachelor pad with a killer man cave. The outside area was equally unspectacular and mostly overgrown. Worth mentioning was an abandoned golf trophy I probably should have taken it with me to send to Trump as a consolation prize for when he loses the primary against DeSanctimonious. Bwahahahahaha! Oh, and there was some other golf stuff left behind, too – bags, clubs, clothing…
The nearby driving range at the other end of the parking lot was mostly overgrown, which made it look a bit more interesting than the club house, which looked more like a surfer shop or something; probably due to location and the real name. Inside I found a first aid kit in a wooden box, plenty of golf balls and some clubs, outside there were some simple plastic chairs and tables as well as some drive mats (?) or whatever they are called.

Abandoned driving ranges in that condition are rather rare in Japan, so I really appreciated the rather unusual exploration – and the main building was just a nice bonus. Sure the *Japanese Driving Range* and the *Countryside Golf Course* were nicer individually, but as a package this was a pretty good abandoned golf site. And now it’s time for dinner… I think I’ll go with meatballs!

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Sneak Peek

Posted in Abandoned, Amusement Park, Asia, Factory, Haikyo, Hospital, Hotel / Ryokan, Japan, Love Hotel, Photography, Sacred Site, School, Ski, Snow, Spa / Onsen, Sports, Travel, Urbex on 2022/03/30| 32 Comments »

It’s been almost two months since the last article, the longest time ever in AK history. Heck, even when I traveled to *North Korea* I kept the weekly publishing rhythm by scheduling prewritten stuff. But that was back in 2013 – and a lot has changed since then…
I actually don’t really know where to start or end, but I wanted to write a sneak peek article for quite a while now, so maybe the good news first – at the end of this… rant?… you’ll find a gallery with photos of 30 of my favorite yet unpublished locations. Could have stopped at 20, could have easily gone to 40 or 50, but I thought 30 would be a good number as it is about the average number of photos per article. The photos are between a few days and more than 10 years old. Some I held back on purpose, others I’ve just overlooked and always chose different places to write about for various reasons. Some have become super popular amongst explorers in Japan, others are original finds. Some haven’t changed a bit since I’ve documented them, quite a few have been vandalized, one or two even have been demolished – most of them have been featured on *Facebook* and *Twitter*, but I don’t think any of them made it here, to the blog. So here is a small selection of my favorite unpublished places as a sneak peek, because… well… you never know what’s going to happen to me or Abandoned Kansai. At least this way you get a taste of some of the locations that are close to my heart.

That’s 30 of maybe 200 already documented unpublished abandoned places – if I would stop exploring today I could run Abandoned Kansai for about 4 more years with weekly articles; which is not going to happen for sure. First of all I won’t give up exploring any time soon, as long as I can walk I will go out there, even though 2021 was a mixed bag – some amazing, borderline mind-blowing explorations in all nine regions of Japan, resulting in a surplus since I “only” published 28 articles in 2021; though 2.3 articles per month isn’t a bad average, considering that this is a non-profit one man hobby project. Well, the blog is, the explorations aren’t, which is one of the reasons why the monthly average went down. Due to Covid and (fur) babies, 2021 was the first year in a decade or so that I did more explorations solo than with co-explorers – which is a huge difference in how I experience locations and the hobby in general. Solo explorations are always more nerve-racking, more costly, more exhausting, more secretive. Whenever I explored solo I am much less inclined to talk about the experience – it’s so much more personal, especially when the location/s was / were original finds. In 2021 I explored on maybe a handful of days with friends and those explorations were amazing, especially since they usually included the better lunch breaks! But it also meant that 2021 was a much less social exploration year, which definitely affected my urge to write articles for the blog. The blog… I know the format is outdated now and the chosen layout probably has been from day 1, but I guess that is what happens when somebody who never read blogs starts his own one, even at the heyday of blogging. Nowadays it seems like the attention span has become so short that people are not just overwhelmed by blogs, but if you attach more than two photos on social media. It’s all about bite sized portions – but many of them! Which is kind of frustrating, too. The Abandoned Kansai pages on *Facebook* and *Twitter* are still growing and are much easier to feed as they only require a photo and a sentence per shot – but I’m just irritated by the lack of appreciation that is shown there. I ride four rush hour trains per work day, and the amount of posts people consume on their way to / from work is locust like; they go through dozens of entries on their feeds, barely ever leaving a reaction or even comment, showing hardly any respect for the content creators; especially the small ones. At the same time pretty much all the blogs I started to read after I initiated mine have faltered in the last 4 or 5 years; most of them I removed from my Blogroll already, but even the remaining ones are basically dead. Back in 2013/14/15 some of my articles received up to three digits in WordPress internal Likes and dozens of comments – nowadays the WordPress Like system is almost not existent anymore and articles hardly ever have more than five or six comments (shoutout to long-term readers like beth, Brandon, maclifer, Benjamin, Elias, and especially Gred Cz, who accounts for about 50% of the comments these days :)…). Those comments were a huge motivation, not just because most of them were positive (and I’m not exempt from enjoying reading nice things about what I created!), but because I enjoyed the communication with all kinds of people in general, especially those who actually knew the abandoned place I’ve written about when they were still in use. 90% of that communication has been replaced with silence at best… and unpleasant exchanges at worst, from multi-million USD companies trying to get free photos over rude messages like “Yo dawg, coordinates?” to flat-out insults. Thanks to Amazon, Tripadvisor, Yelp and such EVERYBODY has become a critic – and anonymity turned a surprisingly large number of people into characters I’d rather stay away from… Which isn’t exactly motivating me to publish things on any internet platform.

Add a couple of health scares (no Covid, I’m just getting old…), blog / explorations related personal disappointments (that alone could fill an article…), general Covid restrictions as well as some grown-up responsibilities to the mix and I guess you’ll understand why the time between articles has become longer and longer over the last two or three years…

To wrap this up: What is going to happen to Abandoned Kansai? Your guess is as good as mine! No articles at all is as unlikely as going back to a weekly pace. I’ll probably continue to write articles and publish them when they are done – aiming for at least one per month, but more likely two (or three, if a month has five Tuesdays). And if you see something by Abandoned Kansai on social media, please feel free to show a reaction so I know that I actually reach an audience. Comments are always welcome, especially if you have a “always be kind” policy when commenting; not just at AK, but in general. Abandoned Kansai has been running for more than twelve years now – and if a few dozen of you stay with me, I don’t see a reason why we shouldn’t reach 20 or 25 years! Thank you for reading (till) the end – and please enjoy the gallery!

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Demolished Olympic Ruins Of Sapporo 1972

Posted in Abandoned, Demolished, Haikyo, Hokkaido, Japan, Photography, Race Track, Sports, Travel, Urbex on 2022/02/01| 10 Comments »

The Olympic Ruins of Beijing 2022 is an article I really want to write, but I’m sure certain Olympic venues in China’s capital will go down faster than opposition members – and Covid making international travel rather complicated I hope some locals will take over. Instead today we’ll focus on the Demolished Olympic Ruins Of Sapporo 1972, a small follow-up on an article I wrote a decade ago!

Happy New Year! Well, most likely not when you are an Uyghur, but more than a billion Chinese people are probably having a jolly good time today and the days to come… Especially Winnie the Xi(thead)! Not only can he stuff his face without regrets due to the holidays, in a few days the years long bribery of IOC members will finally pay off and he can present his home country to the world like the Nazis did Theresienstadt to the Red Cross. By his side: Thomas Bach, who probably would be in jail or dead for acting like he did in the past few years, if he were a Chinese politician and not the president of the International Olympic Committee. Those two must be so proud! Finally Olympic Games again in a country with concentration camps after only 86 years…
*hrumph* Where was I? Oh, yes, focusing on the demolished ruins of the Sapporo Olympic Games… Usually around the beginning or the end of Olympic games I re-release a photo of the bobsleigh goal house of the 1972 Olympics that I first published in an article called “The Olympic Ruins Of Sapporo 1972” back in 2012. It was one of the few abandoned buildings worldwide with the Olympic Rings still attached, and it was already partly collapsing and covered by snow, so overall a nice photo. That building was demolished in early 2017 and I took some photos of it two years later. Rather unspectacular on a grey, overcast day – pretty miserable actually. Since there was no snow this time you can actually see more of the abandoned bobsleigh track, which was still there at the time of my visit. And I doubt that they will ever demolish that concrete half-tube… Maybe they can refurbish it? Apparently Sapporo is a candidate for the Olympic Winter Games 2030!
And now let’s raise a glass to the Lightning Seeds and their missed opportunity of making a buck remaking their most famous song for the Beijing Olympics: “It’s coming home, it’s coming home, it’s coming…”

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Overgrown Ski-Jumping Hill

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Haikyo, Japan, Photography, Sports, Travel, Urbex on 2021/10/26| 4 Comments »

It’s been four and a half years since I last posted about an abandoned ski-jumping hill – and this one was a completely different experience!

The time’s a few minutes after 8 a.m. on a gloomy autumn Friday morning. It finally stopped raining after doing so all night, the temperature was about 10°C and I found myself in the outskirts of a small town in the mountains of Japan. My alarm clock went off more than two hours prior and I just got off a cozy bus that I’ve been on for more than half an hour. Still tired and slightly disoriented I stumbled down the deserted main road and up a backstreet in search of a small ski-jumping hill I had spotted as blurry marks on GoogleMaps a couple of months earlier. But instead of what supposed to be a sandy hill all I could find was a wet wall of vegetation towering over me, mainly various kinds of grass. I wasn’t prepared for this, neither mentally nor physically, wearing jeans, a T-shirt and a thin zip-up hoodie. Instead of sipping ice-cold drinks and ransacking the buffet of a luxury resort I was spending my paid vacation days like that? Really? But here I was, still dry, but already miserable. The next bus back to civilization was leaving in about 25 minutes – or an hour later, so I had to make a decision: Following my gut fighting through the cold and wet jungle in hope of finding some remains… or heading back to the bus stop right away?
Well, you are reading this, so obviously I have a story to tell and didn’t just leave. I had a look at the ground and broke through the grass wall at a spot where I hoped people once accessed that godforsaken ski-jumping hill – and of course it only took seconds to partly soak my jeans and my hoodie, making me even more miserable than before. But Lady Luck was on my side for about 5 seconds this morning, and soon after I got drenched like a poodle in a thunderstorm I found a few remains of the now abandoned ski-jumping hill. Nevertheless this was neither easy nor fun, but fortunately I had my zoom lens mounted, giving me the flexibility I needed in this situation as it was pretty clear that I wouldn’t get close to anything soon; except wet grass. The abundant vegetation made it almost impossible to properly focus automatically, so I had to manually adjust, which lead to some “unusual” photos. Unfortunately the vegetation became thicker and thicker, so I gave up ascending the hill at about the halfway mark and made my way back to catch the bus to civilization without making my situation worse and ruin the schedule for the rest of the day. With one to three hours between connections in the countryside, time is of the essence – and in this case I had three more big ticket locations on my list for the day, doubting that I could take any better photos where I was now.

10 minutes later I ended up on one of the rare buses back to town, completely wet and… miserable on the one hand, but very satisfied on the other – I consider the Overgrown Ski-Jumping Hill an original find; a location I found myself and of which I had never seen photos before. In that regard it was a great experience, and some of the photos are actually at least decent. But being completely wet on a damp, cold bus at 8:30 in the morning after an only partly successful exploration isn’t exactly worth striving for. At least I didn’t catch a cold, so overall I’m pleased with the results, especially in hindsight, but *for a much better abandoned ski-jumping hill I recommend clicking here*.

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