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…
Tottori is famous for its sand dunes, vast natural parks and pear omiyage – not for urban exploration. Located in the Chugoku region at the Sea of Japan (a.k.a. Korea East Sea and Japanese Sea) and therefore at the northern coast of Japan, Tottori is a little bit off the beaten tracks – most tourists travelling south of Tokyo continue via Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe to Himeji, Hiroshima and Kyushu along the Seto Inland Sea. Only a handful of Western tourists switch to one of the express trains from Kansai to Tottori (city), the capital of Tottori (prefecture) – there is no Shinkansen service as a northern line connecting Osaka and Shimonoseki via Tottori and Matsue was proposed in 1973 and then shelved indefinitely. The least populous of Japan’s prefectures (3.5 million inhabitants, less than the city Yokohama) is generally rather rural and agriculture is the most important economical factor – pears, scallions, yams and watermelons from Tottori are famous in all of Japan.
One thing Tottori is not famous for is urban exploration. Nevertheless I had plans to go to Tottori for almost a year, but for some reason I never followed through. The places I wanted to visit there were not that spectacular, the weather wasn’t consistent for a whole weekend, the season wasn’t right or I simply had other plans. In spring of 2012 everything came together finally, so I hopped on the first of eight special direct trains to Tottori and enjoyed the 2.5 hour long ride through the stunning Chugoku Mountains. After finding and checking into a hotel I did some haikyo hiking to another location and finally arrived at the gorgeous Tottori Sand Dunes in the late afternoon – running out of time, as so often.
The Sand Dune Palace turned out to be quite a rundown building secured by rusty barbed wire, only worth taking pictures of thanks to its relative fame and the round viewing platform which gave this old rest house (built in 1965) a little bit of an edge by making it more round… The salty sea air was gnawing through anything metal, especially lamp posts and handrails. All the bells and whistles, like door handles and lamps looked so 60s that it almost hurt the eyes. Really nothing special, so I headed over to the dunes to find my way to the beach in order to take some sunset photos. On the way back, late into dusk, I made another quick stop to take a couple of night shots, but then I had to leave to catch the last bus back to the city – it was an exhausting day and sadly not everything lived up to my expectations; for example the Sand Dune Palace – the pear sweets on the other hand were divine and if you ever go to Tottori, make sure to try the “nashi usagi” (literally “pear rabbits”, mochi filled with pear jam).
The Abandoned German Villa I explored more than two years ago – a place so mysterious that it doesn’t even have an “official” name in the German urban exploration and geocaching communities. Some explorers call it Villa Zimmermann (“villa carpenter”), others Villa Waldeslust (“villa forestlust”, kind of analog to the word wanderlust…) or Villa Kinderheim (“villa children’s home”) – probably due to the fact nobody seems to know much about the villa’s history, except that it first was a mansion, then a brothel and finally a children’s home. Or at least that’s what one person said and the rest just runs with it, because I’ve never seen any proof or even a timeline to support that claim. The geocachers of course use a fourth name including the village the villa is in – which basically gives away its location even without exact coordinates as that village has like three different streets… Or better: they used, past tense, as the cache is archived now – probably because it attracted too many cachers and therefore too much attention. Luckily I did some research two years ago, and to quote a geocaching visitor from back then: “Today we were the fourth group to log this cache!” The fourth group in one day! Wow… The *Deportation Prison Birkhausen* comes to mind.
Exploring the Abandoned German Villa was an interesting experience as it looked so familiar and strange at the same time. Familiar, because I grew up in Germany with houses like that. Strange, because I picked up urban exploration as a hobby while in Japan – and locations like that of course are hard to find in the Far East.
Surrounded by massive walls and fences it was easy to see that the villa once must have been the mansion of a very rich family – probably built in the 1920s plus / minus a decade. The main gate, protecting a private road of about 150 or 200 meters leading up to the main building, was completely overgrown, so my old high school friend Torsten and I had to find another way in, which was surprisingly easy, despite the lush vegetation. Once on the premises we didn’t have to worry about getting spotted by anybody as pretty much everything there was overgrown.
The first area we explored was a really old garage / storage building – a paradise for spiders and bugs; nothing nasty though, because we are talking about urbex in Germany. Nature loves Germany! Back in the days this building must have been state of the art, with the ground being tiled and the walls being plastered. We continued along the private road for a couple of last meters, ignored the villa to the left and had a look at the barn, clearly modernized just years before the whole thing was abandoned. The lower part, most likely stables for rabbits and probably something like donkeys, looked a lot like the garage we just left, the upper part on the other hand was a rather nice wooden construction with only few signs of decay. In the forest behind the barn we found a small brick-built shack with a couple of old stuff inside – a perfect setup for a stunning nativity play.
Back on the other side Torsten and I first explored an annex of the villa, including a small basement too dark to take photos at without a tripod, but the heating system there revealed that it was installed in 2001 and last serviced in 2003. I was especially fascinated by the three generations of electricity switches right next to each. Sights like that make me love urban exploration so much! On the other hand the place saw quite a bit of vandalism and everything was dirty and full of spider webs. The sweet is never as sweet without the sour.
The main building, the Abandoned German Villa, was where we went next. Three floors plus an attic, solid stone, but clearly modernized every once in a while; for example using double-glazed windows. Sadly there was more vandalism than interior, nevertheless it was really interesting to explore the layout of the villa, seeing signs for its use as a private home, a brothel and a boarding house. I am sure when first occupied the villa was just gorgeous, with lots of space for a big family, especially considering how most people lived in the early 20th century. In the basements we found signs of a cheesy bar area, probably installed in the 1960s/70s during the mansion’s brothel days. In the attic and on the upper floor were signs of the last residents – a John Sinclair magazine (popular German pulp fiction with more than 2200 issues since 1973… and still counting!), amateur art, letters written in careless handwriting.
Torsten and I were already on our way out when we discovered another overgrown building the size of a single family home a little bit to the side. It took some effort to get past the blackberry bushes, but like at the dirty annex two hours prior, the sweet is never as sweet without the sour. The interior of the building was mostly empty and quite moldy, but it was all about the details again. For example neither of us dared to go down to the basement, just based on the smell coming up and the mushrooms growing on the stairs. Personally I loved the stickers on the walls and the doors, clearly from the 80s, with subjects like theme parks, clothing and electronics (Eifelpark – Der größte Wild- und Erlebnispark der Eifel / Eifelpark – The biggest wildlife and adventure park in the Eifel). Easy to miss details included the locks on the outside face of the room doors. If the villa and its surrounding buildings were really used as a boarding school, I guess some of the residents were locked in as punishment or security measures. My favorite detail of them all though was the wallpapers in a room on the ground floor. Not because they were mostly gone, but because there were several layers of them… and upon closer look one of those layers were actually newspapers glued to the wall! Old newspapers, in fact. A piece on the ground had written “February 23rd 1929” on it. A small readable article was about an 18-year-old student in Berlin, who was a member of the right-wing organization “Der Stahlhelm” and shot during a brawl with communists – “slyly”, according to the piece, so it probably was a right-wing newspaper.
Despite quite a bit of vandalism the Abandoned German Villa was a wonderful place to explore – little details were everywhere to be found, most of them revealed more about the location’s history. It wasn’t a spectacular exploration like the *Nakagusuku Hotel Ruin*, but the countless details totally made up for it. It took me a while to write about the villa, but it’s still one of my favorite explorations in Germany! (Next time with a tripod though, because even on a sunny day the place is gloomy like hell…)
Abandoned Japanese towns must be the most common type of *haikyo*. For decades people have been moving from the countryside to the cities… and the trend continues: Almost 70% of Japan’s population live on 3.3% of the land – it’s a mountainous country, and the further you drive into the valleys, the more half-abandoned villages you’ll see; some are deserted completely, especially those so remote that they are almost completely cut off from the outside world in winter. (And that’s the main reason why ghost towns don’t show up at urbex blogs so much – only a few, like *Mukainokura*, are easily accessible; for most of them you need to have a car or a motorcycle…)
Across one of those hamlets my buddy Rory and I stumbled on our way to an off the beaten tracks location somewhere in the mountains of the Shiga / Mie / Gifu triangle. We thought it would be a good idea taking a direct way along a narrow one lane road stretching up and down several mountains instead of using the ridiculously expensive highways in Japan. It was a sunny day in March not only in Osaka (where there is no winter…), but also in Shiga. So we drove up one mountain in beautiful weather and started to descent on the other side… when all of a sudden we saw snow on the side of the road. We descended further and further, snow slowly creeping closer until we started driving on it. When we saw said hamlet, we made a quick stop to take a picture or two and continued driving… until we hit a dead end. The snow was getting too high and there was no way we were able to continue. So we turned around – and got stuck in the snow right in the middle of the hamlet (GoggleMaps doesn’t have a name for it, so I just simply call it Japanese Ghost Town). So I got out of the car and started pushing, successfully. Until we got stuck again a couple of hundred meters down the road, up the mountain. This time I needed the help of some boards that were conveniently placed right next to the road (coincidence?), but to both of our great relief we got grip right away and returned to the weather divide, this time without further incidents. Down the mountain on the Shiga side we found out that the only regular road nearby was still closed for winter, so we made our way back to Osaka as we were running out of time anyway.
Half a year later, November 2013, on our way to the remote haikyo Rory and I wanted to explore in spring – this time the first location of the day, not the third. Beaten by that darn valley six months prior and dangerously close to winter we decided to give the narrow mountain road another try. When we reached the hamlet this time there was no snow in sight, so we got out of the car and considered the place an original find. What started as “a quick look” turned into an hour long full exploration of about a dozen houses, most of them partly collapsed. All the buildings were Japanese style, which means mostly wood, so even the rather undamaged buildings were quite brittle once we found a way inside (without using force, of course) – half a dozen more winters with heavy snow and they will be flattened, too. To make the houses more stable and more durable, some outside walls were clad with thin metal plates. One of the houses still had an active digital (!) wattmeter above the entrance door and where we parked the car we found a laminated sheet of paper with information about an on demand taxi as a replacement for a regular bus service. My favorite item though was an abandoned bike, clearly an older model, maybe from the 50s or 60s. A really lovely piece of rust!
After we left the hamlet, we continued beyond the point where were forced to turn around half a year prior – and then we got lost in the mountains and reached dead ends… several times… losing massive amounts of time. The car’s navi more or less useless, we finally found a real road that lead us back to civilization, so we headed for the main road that was closed in March because of snow. This time we passed this point, too, only to get stopped in front of a tunnel – mudslides had severely damaged the road on the other side more than a year prior, so the tunnel was closed indefinitely, yet the road was open for hikers to reach a popular trailhead in spring, summer and autumn.
Running out of time again, Rory and I made our way back to Osaka, hoping to reach Location X on a third attempt. Or by finally trying a different route…
After I finished exploring the modern parts of the *Japanese Countryside University* I remembered some roped-off areas that I didn’t dare to step in out of respect for an elderly artist who was nothing but kind to me when I first entered the premises – but when he left, my urbex instincts kicked in and I just had to have a look. All those buildings I had already seen, they looked way too new for a university founded in 1964, so there must have been more… and there were!
The Japanese Countryside University definitely consisted of two parts; an older one from the 1960s and a newer one from the 1980s. The older part originally was a six floor main building across the street from the train station. On the third floor was a back exit / entrance leading to a book store and the old dormitory via a strange dark tunnel contruction that had written “Rape!” all over it. (Well, not really, but I felt like I could have been assaulted at any time and I was pretty sure that I was alone…) Down from the street a road was leading up, too, to what originally probably was a parking lot and now is the 1980s building complex.
Since I was coming from that elevated area I made my way through the pretty vandalized old dormitory, quite a mindblowing contrast to the immaculate modern building right next to it. It seems like the Japanese Countryside University was a women’s college with a 10 p.m. curfew, but all that was living in those original buildings now were a couple of gigantic and pretty fast spiders. Not like the colorful ones sitting in their webs everywhere, no, more like thin tarantula looking ones, the size of saucers…
From the dormitory I went straight to the old university building at the street and I understood immediately why the new buildings were constructed on elevated ground – even on a Sunday the noise was pretty annoying. Sadly most of the building was empty, so there wasn’t that much to see, nevertheless it was an interesting exploration. On the way out I took a couple of photos of the former sports ground. The soccer / track area was gone completely, but the tennis courts were still intact; somewhat overgrown though, reminding me of the *Asahi Sports Center*.
The Japanese Countryside University is still virtually unknown to the internet and I might have been the first foreigner to ever lay eyes on it, so this was a true exploration with new sights around every corner – not necessarily a spectacular one, but a new one! When I was planning this exploration I put together two train schedules for that day. One giving me 40 minutes to explore the Japanese Countryside University, in case the place was inaccessible, demolished or just uninteresting. The alternative plan gave me 1 hour and 40 minutes to explore, which is probably about the average time I spend at an abandoned place. More than 3 hours and 250 photos after my arrival I finally left this spectacularly unspectacular location I was longing to explore for more than a year – luckily it totally lived up to the high expectations I had.
After *a surprisingly successful recent exploration in China* it’s about time to write about a surprisingly unsuccessful exploration in Japan I did 3.5 years ago.
On a nice spring day I made my way to Wakayama prefecture to check out the Kuratani Onsen, which had a reputation for being one of the most beautiful abandoned onsen in all of Japan. The next train station was about 1.5 hours away, but I didn’t mind the walk towards one of Wakayama’s gorgeous mountain ranges. Along the way I saw a small abandoned house, emptied, windows smashed – rather uninteresting, despite me being rather inexperienced back then. Probably somebody’s weekend home in the 1990s.
A few minutes later I finally reached the Kuratani Onsen… and I was shocked by its condition. Parts of the building complex were collapsed, probably under the weight of snow in the winter – the downside of unmaintained wooden buildings, gorgeous as they usually are. The rest was trashed beyond believe. But not just vandalized, filled with trash up to my knees in parts. It’s generally amazing how much garbage you find in remote areas in Japan as waste disposal can be quite expensive in the land of the rising sun. But what kind of person would drive to an abandoned building and get rid of their trash there?
Not only was the whole place nasty because of it, the trash also attracted all kinds of animals – spiders, flies, bugs; probably some rodents, too. This was probably the most disgusting abandoned place I’ve ever visited – and since it was before my “jeans and hiking boots even in summer when doing urbex” habit, I didn’t even try to make my way across all that garbage. Instead I took a path on the right side of the building to make it to the upper floor, smashed to pieces and probably not safe either… The metal entrance part was already too rusty for me to trust it on a solo exploration. And so I left with a couple of crappy photos after about half an hour. Not my shortest exploration ever (that title still belongs to the more or less failed *Sekigahara Menard Land* snow expedition earlier the same year), but probably one of the most disappointing ones.
And that’s pretty much it… One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, so I hope you were not too disappointed by this week’s article (though I wouldn’t blame you, but not all of my explorations are spectacular, so sometimes I have to write about duds, too) – but if you were, you might consider *liking Abandoned Kansai on Facebook*. Especially in weeks with an unspectacular location I upload some exclusive preview material there – the photos scheduled for later this week will show you some amazing locations that I’m sure you will like as much as I do!
Urban exploration in China is something I thought I would never do – and actually only did by chance. In October of 2013 I was on my way to a second trip to North Korea; not *Pyongyang and the southern parts* again, but North Hamgyong province and the Special City Rason in the north of the DPRK. To reach those areas you don’t fly into Pyongyang via Beijing, but you enter and exit by land. Meeting point for those trips is the Chinese city Yanji, an up and coming 400.000 people town quite close to Russia and less than an hour away from the North Korean border. The tour to Korea ended on a Monday evening… and since Korean Air doesn’t offer any flights on Tuesdays I was stuck in Yanji for a whole day. My buddy Nikolai, who spent a couple of months learning Korean in this town without any tourist attractions at all, told me about a half-abandoned amusement park in the city center. “Half-abandoned” sounded like a dying amusement park to me, one with fewer visitors than necessary, one that is supposed to close soon. Little did I know that he meant an amusement park where literally half of the attractions were abandoned. And that’s not even the weirdest thing about it!
The People’s Park (人民公園) in Yanji looks like a normal public park when entering from the south – a big pond full of water plants, a couple of peddlers selling food and plastic toys, some sculptures (including tasteful nudes), a few benches, and senior citizens playing games at tables. After a couple of minutes you’ll reach animal cages and stalls filled with all kind of more or less exotic animals… as the People’s Park features a free public zoo. But that’s not all! Right where the zoo ends is a small dump area with a couple of abandoned seats, small stands and parts of carnival rides – and at first I thought that was what Nikolai meant when talking about the half-abandoned park. Boy, was I wrong!
Within earshot of the rusty remains I spotted small Ferris wheel, blasting some music into the silence of this sunny Tuesday noon. Customers? None. Potential customers? Only a few more.
The (not so) big wheel was surrounded by 15 to 20 other carnival rides. Two or three of them were also open and running, half a dozen others looked more or less well maintained – and the rest of them were actually abandoned, except for the single demolished one; paint flaking off, weeds growing through a mini roller coaster, seats weathering, concrete crumbling.
This place was so friggin weird! It looked like an abandoned pay-as-you-go amusement park, but it wasn’t, because every other minute you would run into some sweethearts looking for entertainment, and there was music playing in the background all the time; some of it being karaoke sung by a few senior citizens further up the hill. It was so creepy and bizarre – and calming yet very exciting at the same time! Usually I have to sneak around and jump some fences, especially when exploring abandoned theme parks… but not this time! Relaxed I made my way from attraction to attraction and took pictures of whatever I wanted at my own speed, not worrying about anything. When I thought it couldn’t get any better (except for being there on a misty day!) I hit the weirdo jackpot!
I’ve seen a haunted house or two in my lifetime, but none with a naked female torso breaking through the wall on the upper floor, a big hand trying to hold her back, partly covering one boob – next to a monstrous mutant face. But that’s not all! To the left and mid-air was a nude couple (male and female) in a grotesque pose, attacked by two gigantic green snakes – the guy’s face full of panic, the girl’s face barely visible, but clearly in agony, one of the snakes biting into her left shoulder and half of the exposed torso.
The back of the abandoned haunted house wasn’t a tiny bit less bizarre and probably my favorite area in the whole park. There I found a couple of concrete or gypsum animals lying on the ground and standing around, the greyish material spalling off in huge chunks, revealing steel wires underneath. Next to a path nearby was a huge Buddha statue rotting away, made of a Styrofoam looking material – accompanied by the concrete statue of a naked Chinese fairy, right in front of a white rabbit with red eyes carrying a gigantic mushroom… which at this point I felt I must have smoked earlier!
The *second abandoned Japanese sex museum* meets *Nara Dreamland*… with no security standards whatsoever. One of the remaining running rides was a monorail through half of the park. It’s height? About two meters – and no protection at all. I was able to touch the rail at any time and even smaller people carelessly stretching could get hurt seriously by one of the monowheel looking cars. Trash, broken glass and mirrors, rusty metal, brittle animal figures – everything was scattered in the woods around the park and nobody seemed to care about it.
The carnival section of the People’s Park in Yanji was one long bizarre exploration and one of my favorite abandoned amusement parks overall. Deserted theme parks are generally creepy, but the fact that this one was only half-abandoned took it to a whole new level!
Abandoned furniture stores are quite rare, I’ve actually never heard of one before. Most of the times they are located near shopping malls and either the direct competition takes over and slams their name on it – or some other giant store is happy about aquiring cheap real estate with lots of selling space. Möbel Erbe was different though – and it ended in a fascinating but sad story about greed and incompetence…
First of all, just in case your German is rusty: Möbel means furniture. So Möbel Walther is a furniture store named after the Walther family, Möbel Kraft was named after the Kraft family and Möbel Erbe… right, after the Erbe family.
Until the mid-2000s the Erbe family owned two huge furniture stores, one in Hanau near Frankfurt (more than 50000 square meters, which equals about 538200 square feet) and one in Schkeuditz near Leipzig (about 25k sqm). There might have been a third store, but more likely is that some authors were confused by stores of the same name or by not knowing much about geography. (E.g. Dölzig is near Schkeuditz, but it’s highly unlikely that Möbel Erbe would have run two stores of that size within five Kilometers of each other.) It was generally tough to find information about the company’s history, specifics about furniture stores are not exactly popular a topic on the internet…
What I was able to find out was that in 2000 Möbel Erbe expanded their original company home with a 5-storey, 30000 sqm building right across the street and connected it with a glass bridge. The so-called “Eurostore” aimed at a younger audience, kind of an IKEA clone. Successfully, according to news reports from 2002, when owner Thomas Erbe was awarded the “OSKAR für den Mittelstand” (OSKAR for Small and Medium Sized-Businesses”) by the Oskar Patzelt Foundation; kind of the Academy Award of enterprises in Germany – which is why the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences sued… and settled out of court after seven years in 2005, with the prize being renamed to “Großer Preis des Mittelstandes” (Grand Prize of Small and Medium Sized-Businesses). Erbe reportedly was chosen from almost 1000 companies after being nominated four times in previous years. Basically a rock-solid company from all I know, with more than 100 Million Euros revenue per year…
In 2005 strange things happened… In February media reported that the furniture store chain “Sconto” was trying to get permission to build another store in Großaurach near Hanau, but residents and politicians there voiced opposition. Sconto belongs to Kurt Krieger, who also owns Möbel Kraft, Möbel Walther as well as Höffner – plus probably some more, but the company structure is complicated and at least one of his daughters, Sonja Krieger, is in the business, too; acting indepedently, of course. Anyway, Sconto in Großaurach near Hanau wasn’t going to happen and so on July 1st Höffner announced the acquisition of Möbel Erbe out of nowhere; Kurt Krieger in control of Hanau, Sonja Krieger in control of Schkeuditz; and Thomas Erbe told a newspaper that he considered himself responsible personally that nobody gets fired.
Three weeks later Sonja Krieger announced that Möbel Erbe in Schkeuditz would be closed due to the store’s catastrophic economical situation she said she wasn’t aware of before… Yeah, right. Daddy’s in the furniture business since 1967 and is #2 right behind IKEA in Germany and they had no clue what they were buying… so they had to close… by the end of August! Right. But it gets worse!
Four weeks after the aquisition of Möbel Erbe in Hanau and just one week after his daughter fired 120 people in Schkeuditz (the Krieger family conglomerate owned two gigantic stores nearby and didn’t offer any of the former Erbe employees jobs there…) Kurt Krieger announced that Möbel Erbe in Hanau would be closed. But he wasn’t in a rush. While his daughter gave her employees only five weeks notice, “Karate Kurti” was nicer and gave them seven weeks… The reasons given? Same as is in Schkeuditz, the catastrophic economical situation of the store. This time 230 employees were fired, despite (or because of…) the fact that the Krieger family owned two other mega stores less than a dozen kilometers away from Möbel Erbe in Hanau, which was closed in mid-September. But it gets worse!
On December 27th a Sconto furniture store opened in Hanau… in the building formerly occupied by the Eurostore. Yes, in the exact same Möbel Erbe extension Kurt Krieger bought along with the main building… and whose employees he fired just four months prior! Oh, BTW, according to media reports Kurt Krieger’s personal fortune is about 600 million Euros…
(This is the story how I pieced it together from about two dozen news reports I found online. If any former employee or other insiders know more about the story please feel free to correct me or add bits and pieces!)
Eight years after the main store was closed, it is still empty and in worse shape than ever. The latest media reports about the completely vandalized building are from 2011, stating that Kurt Krieger suggested several business plans about food retail and electronic stores, all of which were declined by the Hanau city council, which decided in 2005 that they won’t allow any other retail stores on the premises in an attempt to proctect retailers in downtown Hanau from mega stores in the outskirts. So the inevitable happened and airsoft players, graffiti sprayers and vandals took over.
Interestingly enough I had never heard of the abandoned Möbel Erbe Furniture Store before, despite its quite exposed location – it was actually my sister who spotted it from the car when we were on our way to some closed / abandoned military bases in Hanau, including the *Pioneer Kaserne* I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. For some reason the place doesn’t seem to be very popular with German urban explorers… but I actually enjoyed it. Sure, there was not much to see and the huge storage in the back was partly demolished already, but if you had a closer look you could find some interesting things, like the almost completely broken window front or a couple of items like old order forms and left-behind 5.25” floppy disks. Möbel Erbe probably would have been a disappointment if it was supposed to be the exploration highlight of the day, but as an original find it was a perfect snack on the way to other locations…
The Inagawa Trap Shooting in the suburbs of Osaka was one of Japan’s hottest urbex locations back when I started with urban exploration four years ago – huge overgrown buildings with lots of interior and tons of shotgun shells everywhere. It took me a while to figure out its exact location, but then I went there straight away on a sunny winter day…
Osaka is surrounded by several mountain ranges and the burbs often spread into other prefectures, especially Hyogo – the Inagawa Trap Shooting was located in one of those nice, a little bit remote neighborhoods full of single-family houses – and course I got lost, despite photos of the map on my camera. But I was inexperienced and pictures were not detailed enough… Luckily I found my way to a pond I had seen on several Japanese *haikyo* blogs and from that point on it was easy. I followed the partly overgrown path only… to find out that the Inagawa Trap Shooting was demolished!
What a downer… It took me quite long to find the place, so I was looking forward for weeks to visit it – and then it was just some small piles of rubble in the backyard of an ordinary suburb neighborhood. I clearly made another beginner’s mistake – I didn’t look hard enough for information about the location’s current state. To prevent other urban explorers from making the same mistake I created this *GoogleMap of demolished haikyo in Japan*. There you can have a look where you don’t need to go anymore… (Some of the locations of that map I was able to visit before they were demolished, so it’s worth a look even if you don’t plan on doing urbex in Japan yourself.)
With the Inagawa Trap Shooting almost completely gone there was not much I could do – but since the area was rather vast and I was pretty much an urbex noob (one of the first 20 explorations), it took me 1.5 hours to have a look at everything and to take some rather average photos. The most interesting part was a bit in the back – a couple of shacks, one of them filled with countless empty shotgun shells, another one being some kind of rest room and / or command hut; all of them in really bad condition. As I found out later, the shooting range was closed in 1989 and demolished in November 2007 – two years before I even began with urban exploration. Japanese blogs though kept reporting about the Inagawa Trap Shooting with photos of the intact buildings till at least 2012! But well, it took me almost four years to write about it, too…
Festivalgate was a post real estate bubble amusement park in the city center of Osaka, just down the street of the famous Tennoji Zoo and right next to a transportation hub combining two railway lines at Shin-Imamiya Station with the tramway stop Minamikasumicho and the subway station Dobutsuen-mae (literally “in front of the animal park”) on the city’s main line Midosuji – although “amusement park” doesn’t really nail it, since the park part was missing. Festival Gate was more like an amusement building with all kinds of arcades, shops, a cinema, restaurants and a rollercoaster on eight floors with a total floor space of more than 5700 m². Though located in a densely populated area with perfect connection to public transportation Festivalgate offered parking space for 380 cars and 120 bikes. Nevertheless it failed twice within 10 years…
I guess the planning of Festivalgate started during the bubble (1986-1991), when the Osaka Municipal Transportation Bureau got rid of the Tennoji Streetcar Garage (大阪市電天王寺車庫). The then leveled lot was split into two parts, A and B – A was the location of the now demolished Festivalgate, on lot B the still operative Spa World was built (a spa wonderland with saunas, waterslides, a gym and themed areas from all around the world). For that the city founded a joint venture with the Mitsubishi UFJ Trust and Banking Corporation and the Chuo Mitsui Trust and Banking Co. (two of Japan’s biggest companies) to raise 50 billion Yen, back then about 290 million Euro / 350 million US$, nowadays 400 million Euro / 532 million US$ (not adjusted for inflation).
Festivalgate opened together with Spa World on July 18th 1997 with an underwater / Atlantis theme – little did they know that they would drown in debt soon…
The opening hours were rather long – 10:00 to 20:00 for stores, 10:00 to 22:00 for amusement facilities, 10:00 to 23:00 for eateries. To give Festivalgate a financial identity you were able to buy discount tickets at vending machines; for 1000 Yen you received a 1100 Yen card, for 3000 Yen you got a 3400 Yen card and for 5000 Yen you were able to enjoy 5800 Yen worth of fun. This was what the floor plan looked liked:
B1 – Underground walkway to Shin-Imamiya Station and Dobutsuen-mae Station.
1F – Miracle Gate: Entrance and main floor.
2F – Plaza Festa: Eateries and shopping.
3F – Festival Pier: Eateries and shopping with a West Coast theme.
4F – Oriental Festa: Eateries and shopping with a Marco Polo theme.
5F – Festa Mosque: Eateries and shopping with a Bazaar theme.
6F – Festa Lab: Arcade game zone (Sega World) with a Jules Verne theme.
7F – Cine Festival: Cinema complex with 4 screens for up to 600 guests total.
8F – View Festa: Restaurant area with a stunning view.
Since Festival was considered an amusement park (no entrance fee though!), of course there were pay as you go attractions scattered all over the floors 2 to 6 – for example 2F had the Mermaid Carousel, 3F had the entrance the parachute tower “Tower of Teos”, 4F had a cat petting zoo and a Chinese Ghost house, 5F had a kid’s land, an airgun museum and the entrance for the iconic rollercoaster and 6F was full of arcade machines run by Sega.
At the beginning Festivalgate was a huge success – in the first year (1997/98) 8.31 million visitors had a look, but in the following year the Asian Financial Crisis hit Japan and numbers dropped significantly. Four years later, which is one year after Universal Studios Japan opened in the south of Osaka, Festivalgate had only 3 million visitors – none of which paid an entrance fee… Shops and restaurants started to drop out and the downwards spiral could not be stopped – in January of 2004 the banks withdrew from the project, driving the Festival Gate Corporation into bankruptcy and leaving the city of Osaka with 20 billion Yen of debt. Orix, a financial service provider most famous for owning and sponsoring the baseball team Orix Buffaloes, stepped up in 2005, but dropped out when it became clear that Festivalgate was a bottomless pit. In January of 2007 the city of Osaka concluded that Festivalgate would cost 200 million Yen per year for maintenance and decided to get over with this unfortunate and highly unprofitable project – the remaining businesses were given notice and Festivalgate closed officially July 31st of the same year. After some back and forth with potential Korean investors the Japanese entertainment giant Maruhan (bets, pachinko parlors) bought Festivalgate in a third auction on January 30th 2009 with a winning bid of 1.4 billion Yen, announcing reconstruction plans soon after. The demolition of Festivalgate began in 2010 and it turned out to be a surprisingly time-consuming process given that Japanese wrecking crews usually are faster than a bunch of piranhas dealing with a chicken…
When I first went to Festivalgate on November 3rd 2010 there was little to nothing to explore, although it seems like the building was still accessible from 2007 till 2009, despite all shops and restaurants being closed. Demolition had already begun, but at least the underground passage and the entrance area on 1F was still accessible with signs announcing that this would change December 17th. Active Japanese construction sites usually are fortified – solid high fences all around, guards in front of every exit, sometimes with small lightsabers to stop pedestrians when vehicles are getting in or out. The Festivalgate deconstruction site was no exception. All potential entrances (including windows) were locked solidly, security was patrolling (probably to keep homeless people away since Festivalgate was in an area that has a rather bad reputation… by Japanese standards), fences were even higher than usual – 3.5 to 4 meters, not the normal 2.5 meters high ones. But not high enough to block the view from the elevated Osaka Loop Line! So I took a couple of photos… and again when I was visiting a friend for a Christmas party later that year. And again whenever I passed by – which wasn’t that often, but still enough to give you a general idea how things progressed. To my surprise it took more than two years to get rid of the ill-fortuned Festivalgate. Good for me (and you) as this article was only possible thanks to that… BTW: Sorry for the quality of the photos – they are not artistic at all, shot from crowded, moving trains, but I think they nevertheless are interesting.
Hardly any other question I hear more often than the above one, maybe with the exception of “Which is your favorite abandoned place?”. Finding abandoned places… it’s easier than you might think – and harder at the same time. Of all the 300 explorations I did (more or less), about half a dozen locations were shown to me; voluntarily, I don’t recall ever asking anybody any specifics. Which also means that I found 98% of the places I explored either by chance (driving around in a car or spotting them from a train) or by doing research – reading other people’s blogs, looking for hints like location names, parts of location names, city names, prefecture names… or paying close attention to photos. Yes, I actually identified abandoned places by looking at mountains, coastal lines or other buildings in the background. Once I thought I found the location of an abandoned cable car, but I was wrong… instead I found an abandoned ropeway virtually unknown to the internet – the cable car I identified half a year later, about 300 kilometers away from where I first thought it would be. If you are lucky you can find urbex maps by less caring explorers, but they tend to be unreliable… and most of the locations revealed on those maps are rather well-known anyway. The real gems are hidden – and it’s even more satisfying finding them than just choosing one from a catalogue!
The Japanese Countryside University is one of those places, a mesmerizing complex of rather new yet partly overgrown buildings; at least according to my internet source. I saw it once on a Japanese blog and never again since. The J-blog dropped a couple of hints, like an abbreviated version of the university’s name, a road number and the fact that there was a train station next to the road – nevertheless it took me several hours to find the exact location, because it turned out that the university still exists and that the abandoned campus was a couple of dozen kilometers out of town… but with a train station along the same road as the main campus. No word about that fact in the article, of course! In the end it took me half a day of research in Japanese and the help of a friend (thanks again, Mayu!) to finally pin down the exact location. I felt like Sherlock Holmes himself when I confirmed the overgrown campus on GoogleMaps… and even better when I finally went there more than a year later. I found that place – and I was about to explore it…
Over the course of the past four years I learned two important things about urbex:
1.) Never enter right away, you might find an easier back entrance!
2.) Don’t sneak around like a thief in the night – approach people unless they wear a uniform!
Arriving at the Japanese Countryside University my heart sank a little bit. The entrance gate had nasty spikes and the road was surprisingly busy, even on a weekend day. So I followed guideline #1 and started to circle the place, only to find an entrance to a big parking lot in the back, where I could not have been seen or heard; or so I thought. Some of the buildings were in amazing condition, despite the fact that the university was closed in 2006. While I was still wondering about that fact I saw two cars parked near the entrance of what appeared to be the main building. Darn! So I got closer and while I was walking between two buildings I saw an older dude kneeling on the ground of floor 1.5 – instincts kicked in and I made my way back to where I entered, without being seen. Then I remembered guideline #2, so I went back, waved (this time the guy saw me…) and entered the building. Living in an English speaking bubble my Japanese is rather basic, so I scraped together a couple of long forgotten phrases and approached the guy – who’s English was about as good as my Japanese. I asked him what this building was and he told me what I already knew. Then I told him that I like old buildings and asked him if it was okay to take some photos. At first I thought he was strictly against it, but then he took me up to the sixth floor of this brand-new looking building from the year 1986 where I was presented with a gorgeous view over the whole campus – sadly I wasn’t able to take some good photos through the windows, but my new friend left me alone and walked down the stairs, so I could take some photos and videos of the building, a former library, at my own speed.
Back at the 1.5th floor we had another quick chat. It turned out that my new friend was a 75-year-old former art teacher and some of the university buildings were in the process of being converted into… some kind of art project; the exact details were lost in translation.
I went on to take some photos outside – and having been been treated with such generosity and kindness I didn’t even consider entering the areas that were roped-off. So I took some more photos and shot a walkthrough from now almost completely overgrown dormitory to the main area.
That’s when I realized that my artist friend was gone… and my urbex instincts kicked in. The ropes. *What was behind those ropes? Well, that’s a story for another time…*
Abandoned Kansai 