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Archive for the ‘Visited in 2012’ Category

Love Hotel tinna

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Chugoku, Closed, Haikyo, Japan, Love Hotel, Photography, Sex, Travel, Urbex, Video, Visited in 2012, Yamaguchi on 2013/12/24| 12 Comments »

Merry XXX-Mas everyone!

The Love Hotel tinna is one of those locations that are giving me a headache. On the one hand I am happy about every exploration, on the other hand… this was barely an exploration and I have hardly enough material for an article. About 20 months ago I was walking along a countryside road on the way to an abandoned place I was looking forward to explore, when I came across the tinna Love Hotel by chance. Not sure how the rest of the day would turn out I passed without a closer look, but considered having one on the way back. If it wouldn’t have been for the ropes blocking off the car entrance I probably wouldn’t have even realized that the place was abandoned or at least closed.

Two hours later I was on my way back to the train station – and since I wasn’t in a hurry I indeed had a closer look. Entering the premises and getting out of sight was quick and easy, the ropes were more or less symbolic. Luckily the sensors at the entrance must have been for triggering lights back in the days, because they surely didn’t cause an alarm to go off.
The back of the love hotel looked a little more abandoned, but just barely. Each room came with a separate garage – you drove in and shut the plastic curtain to get your car some privacy. The room rates (rest / stay) were written at signs next to the doors – which were all locked. That fact makes this article even duller, especially since I don’t know anything about the history of the Love Hotel tinna. I guess it was abandoned just weeks or a few months prior to my visit, but it’s hard to tell for sure. On the other hand: a lot of westerners don’t know much about love hotel, so here you can finally see some exterior shots. For interior shots you might want to have a look at the two articles about love hotels I published in 2011 and 2012. The one about the *Love Hotel Gion* is all about love hotels in general and how big the business is (a whopping 50 billion $-US!), the one about the *Furuichi Love Hotel* is more about dating in Japan and why some Japanese women were once called “Leftover Christmas Cake”…

And that’s it for this week – Merry XXX-Mas!

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Sand Dune Palace

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Chugoku, Haikyo, House, Japan, Photography, Restaurant, Tottori, Travel, Urbex, Video, Visited in 2012 on 2013/12/17| 7 Comments »

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).

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Festivalgate

Posted in Abandoned, Amusement Park, Asia, Demolished, Haikyo, Japan, Map, Osaka, Photography, Travel, Urbex, Visited in 2010, Visited in 2011, Visited in 2012, Visited in 2013 on 2013/10/15| 17 Comments »

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.

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Nara Dreamland – Third Time Lucky

Posted in Abandoned, Amusement Park, Asia, Haikyo, Japan, Kansai, Nara, Photography, Travel, Urbex, Video, Visited in 2012, Zombies on 2013/09/24| 22 Comments »

Nara Dreamland (NDL) has been a constant companion ever since I picked up urbex as a hobby in late 2009. Exploring this gigantic and barely touched abandoned amusement park I had the best of times, I had the worst of times, I definitely started with no wisdom and was quite foolish when entering on a Saturday morning, because I didn’t belief in the security guard there as it was indeed the epoch of incredulity, later I saw Nara Dreamland in the season of light and in the season of darkness, though spring didn’t bring hope and there was as much despair in winter as there was ecstasy.
After I explored Nara Dreamland *overnight for seven hours* in early autumn of 2010 I decided that I would retire the place, never going back there again. Half a year prior to that visit I ran into a security guard on the premises, so I had to come back to settle the matter properly; but after my nighttime adventure, I had seen almost all of the park, so I didn’t feel I had to prove anything anymore – neither to myself nor to anybody else. Till this very day, three years later, I turn(ed) down every requests from friends and strangers to go to Nara Dreamland. Except for that one time…

Oliver from the UK dropped me a couple of lines with “a slightly unusual request” in mid-October of 2011, pretty much a year after what I thought was my final exploration of Nara Dreamland. He was about to get married in Osaka to his fellow Briton Ava and asked very politely if there was a way to include Nara Dreamland somehow. Since smuggling in a whole wedding party was way too risky, the three of us decided to go to the publicly accesible *Eastern Parking Lot* to take some wedding photos and then decide spontaneously what to do next. Of course things didn’t go as planned…

Oliver and Ava just finished changing into their amazing tweed kimonos (no kidding!) when we had an encounter with some locals and decided that we might be better off shooting inside NDL that day. Since climbing barb-wired fences is not a thing you want to do tweed-clad or wearing a kimono (let alone both!) my new friends had to change back, enter the park and put on their unique apparel again. While Ava and Oliver were dressing up in the abandoned Cinderella castle, I took the opportunity to take some daytime photos and videos of areas I actually missed the previous time – only to find out that the soon to be newlyweds realized in my absence that tweed kimonos are not exactly practical in case security shows up and we had to hop it. None of us was looking for trouble, so we decided to just take some light-hearted photos of the engaged couple in normal clothing. On the wooden Aska rollercoaster, the fake Mainstreet USA and some other places all over the park. What a fun and unique way to spend time at an abandoned amusement park!

In addition to some wonderful photos of Ava and Oliver I took tons of pictures of Nara Dreamland as well as half a dozen videos. In the future I will post an additional article or two based on this visit, but for now I hope you will enjoy this never before seen footage – and if you are reading Abandoned Kansai for less than two years I strongly recommend checking out the *Nara Dreamland Special* with links to all previous NDL articles, including some of the most interesting photos I have ever taken!

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New HDR Photos

Posted in Abandoned, Amusement Park, Asia, Chugoku, Chūbu, Gifu, Haikyo, HDR, Hiking, Japan, Kansai, Mie, Museum, Nara, New Zealand, Okayama, Photography, School, Taxidermy, Travel, Urbex, Visited in 2010, Visited in 2011, Visited in 2012, Yamaguchi on 2013/09/21| 2 Comments »

All of the photos I publish with articles on Abandoned Kansai are without any form of enhancing post-production – I don’t even crop them; they either look good or they don’t. Every once in a while I like to play with an HDR tool or two. I wouldn’t call those photos enhanced or improved, I would barely call them photos anymore. That’s why I created a sub-page for them in the background. Today I added ten more of those little artworks to that page. *Please click here to have a look!*

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Red Factory

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Chugoku, Factory, Haikyo, Japan, Okayama, Photography, Urbex, Video, Visited in 2012 on 2013/08/20| 10 Comments »

June is probably the worst month to spend in Japan. While the temperatures are still at a bearable level (25 to 30 degrees Celsius / about 75 to 85 degrees Fahrenheit) the humidity goes crazy thanks to the rainy season. Six weeks of rain, probably on five days a week. Not fun when you like to spend your time outdoors.
Four weeks into the 2012 rainy season the weather forecast announced a whole weekend without rain and I got excited. Finally some urbex again, even an overnight trip for two days. Of course on Friday the forecast changed from two days of sun to sunny on Saturday and rainy on Sunday, but one day of exploration is better than none, so decided to finally visit the “Red Factory”, a favorite of Japanese blogs in the first half of 2012. It was in day trip range, but nevertheless a pain in the ass to get to due to its remote location. The closest train station was about 11 kilometers away, with buses running twice a day on weekends, at 12.30 p.m. and 5 p.m., going back to the station at 7.30 a.m. and 1.30 p.m. – which meant a pretty long walk on the way back…

At least I was able to sleep in on Saturday, only to find the weather wasn’t sunny at all. Not even cloudy. It was overcast, pretty much the worst weather for photography. June in Japan…

3 hours later (2 hours on several trains, then half an hour waiting for another 30 minutes on a bus) I finally reached the Red Factory on this hot and humid, but not sunny, Saturday – and I was a bit disappointed, to say the least. The place was not nearly as big and not nearly as red as I imagined it to be (I picked the “most red” photos for this article…). And the road there was impassable for cars due to a retractable road block I hadn’t seen on any photo before. The first factory building, empty on old Japanese blog entries, usually not to be seen on newer ones (a fact I didn’t realize during my research, of course) was filled with all kinds of canisters, tools and cars with white and yellow license plates – which means privately, not commercially, used vehicles. It looked like somebody started to use the factory as storage buildings. Great… infiltration, not exploration.
Cautiously I continued to walk up the mountain. Next building – a brand-new midget tractor. All the other buildings were pretty much broom-clean. Not exactly what I expected. And what about the partly overgrown house on the other side of the small river running through the factory area? Hastily I quickened my pace to reach the top of the factory area, not sure anymore if it was still abandoned. 50 meters of elevation gain later I reached the end of the factory area. Nobody there, so at least I was sure no human surprises were waiting for me in the back. An animal surprise was there though. A dead animal. Well, more than dead – the skeleton of a deer, most likely a Sika Deer or Japanese Deer, cervus nippon nippon. At least a dozen Japanese urban explorers went to the Red Factory that year and none did care to mention that the place was in use and that parts of a deer skeleton were lying in front of one of the buildings. What the heck…?!

From that point on the exploration was pretty much easy going. Of course I was still worried that somebody would show up, but I was way too busy to avoid spiders, snakes and other animals in the buzzing summer season.

Sadly there is not much I can tell you about the history of the Red Factory. In Japanese it is usually called the Red Ochre Factory, so given the looks of the factory it’s safe to say that the facility was used to produce red ochre from yellow ochre. Captain Obvious strikes again!

Aaaand… that’s pretty much it. Unspectacular exploration, getting there and back took much longer and was much more of an effort than actually exploring the Red Factory. A bit disappointing since I had great expectations, but after sitting at home for several weeks due to the weather it was a welcome change… (The walk back though wasn’t fun at all. Jeans, hiking boots, full camera equipment on an extremely humid day along a river – 11 kilometers in under two hours or I would have missed the train, running every 60 to 90 minutes.)

(If you don’t want to miss the latest article you can *follow Abandoned Kansai on Twitter* and *like this blog on Facebook* – and of course there is the *video channel on Youtube*…)

I planned to publish a video with this article, but Youtube seems to be a bit bitchy again on this computer – I will upload it most likely on August 26th.

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Asahi Sports Center

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Haikyo, Hotel / Ryokan, Japan, Kansai, Photography, Sports, Travel, Urbex, Video, Visited in 2012 on 2013/07/30| 20 Comments »

Asahi beer is popular all over the world, the Asahi Shimbun is a famous Japanese newspaper and Asahi TV is a somewhat known TV station – but the Asahi Sports Center nobody seems to know. Or seemed to know at the time my buddy Dan and I explored the place in October 2012. (If you google the term you will find tons of fitness clubs in Germany and Japan, despite the fact that I use the real name of the place here.)

Japanese summers are hot, humid, full of insects… and they drag on forever, especially in the Kansai region. While back home in Germany friends and family start to complain about grey days and having to wear windbreakers, I spend most late autumn days wearing T-shirts – and risking sunburns. Last year October was no different when Dan and I were approaching the Asahi Sports Center somewhere in the Japanese mountains. Despite wearing a T-shirt I was sweating like a hog, the vegetation still lush, green and thick. Before going to the sports center I only had seen a handful of bad photos on a Japanese blog, the satellite view on GoogleMaps basically useless due to its blurriness. With only a vague idea of what to expect the sheer size of the Asahi Sports Center took us by surprise, making it an all-time favorite at the time of its exploration.

After paying some serious amount of money for highway fees and driving for half an hour through tiniest towns and past forgotten fields we finally reached the Asahi Sports Center – being kilometers away from the next living soul we just parked the car in front of the first building we saw and headed in. It seemed like this was some kind of service center / administrative building. The kitchen on the ground floor was half unrigged, half ripped apart, the restrooms were dark and gloomy, vandalism everywhere; not exactly a warm welcome. The first floor, too, had not been spared by vandals and mould, but at least there we found some flyers and posters including maps, giving us an idea how big the sports center really was – the answer: about 450 by 200 meters. Pretty friggin big!
Two things on the map caught our eyes immediately: the huge swimming pool and the tennis courts. To our misfortune the combination of a drawn map (including artistic freedom…) and rampant nature didn’t make it easy to navigate, so it took a while until we found our way south via several flights of steps and an overpass – across a now completely overgrown kart track!

It was actually this outdoor area that made the Asahi Sports Center so spectacular. The service center was vandalized, but the sports area was just abandoned and overgrown. This part looked like people just didn’t show up anymore and nature took over again – natural decay at its best.
You should think that an abandoned tennis court wouldn’t be very interesting. The ones I saw on *Okunoshima* and near an abandoned retirement home in Germany (yet to come…) were actually quite dull places, but these courts here… amazing! They were located down a slope, lower than the visitor center, and the fences were almost completely overgrown, while the courts including the nets were… well… withered and rusted, but overall in decent condition. Somebody dragged the rusty umpire chairs away, but other than that everything looked eerily normal. The atmosphere was just wonderful, with the sun shining and birds singing; a perfect place to go to for reading a book without getting disturbed.
The huge pool west of the tennis courts was even spookier, thanks to a couple of little buildings surrounding the place, most vandalized and / or overgrown. A perfect place to shoot a horror movie on a grey hazy day… The dark green water looked like you could dump a body there without it ever being seen again once it sank down half a meter or so – a strong contrast to the white painted edge surrounding the creatively shaped pool. Just in sight of the pool we found about half a dozen wooden huts the sports center called Swiss Chalets. (The first video shows a walking tour of both the chalets and the pool.)
Shimmering through the profuse vegetation were some metal constructions, most likely part of the amusement park like rides visible on the posters and tickets at the visitor center. Sadly there was no way to get through, the undergrowth was just still too thick.

Dan and I went back up to the main road and followed it for a while. There we found another set of bungalows and some other buildings. Sadly they were completely vandalized and I had no motivation to take any photos there after enjoying the gorgeous sports area – but I kept the video camera rolling while I was going through the buildings for the first time. Usually I do the walking tours after I have seen everything, so this is a rare opportunity to explore live with me. To see what I saw when I actually saw it for the first time. After about 3 hours on the premises I didn’t expect any trouble anymore, exploring a building for the first time nevertheless is an exciting experience, even if the building is far from being spectacular!
In the neighborhood we also found the so-called convention center – basically a party space with an open fireplace on the ground floor and some rooms with tons of bunk beds upstairs. The Christmas party photos I found at the visitor center were clearly taken here.

Last but not least we followed a road down the mountain to what once was the goal of a summer ski slope – but this area was also completely overgrown, making it rather likely that I will revisit the sports center again one winter; before it starts to snow, but after the vegetation is weakened… 🙂

(If you don’t want to miss the latest article you can *follow Abandoned Kansai on Twitter* and *like this blog on Facebook* – and of course there is the *video channel on Youtube*…)

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Farewell, North Korea… Welcome back, Japan!

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, DPRK, Haikyo, Japan, Korea, Photography, Urbex, Visited in 2012, Visited in 2013 on 2013/07/22| 4 Comments »

My trip to North Korea was an absolutely fantastic experience – and so was writing about it!
If you are a long-time reader of Abandoned Kansai I would like to thank you for sticking with me while I went off-topic! The last urban exploration article I wrote was about the *Abandoned Japanese Sex Museum* – just in case you want to jump back there without going through all the DPRK postings…
If you started reading this blog because of my postings about North Korea I hope you will keep on reading. I think I was able to show you a different side of the DPRK – I sure as heck will show you a different side of Japan, too!
From tomorrow on I will go back to one article per week, every Tuesday evening JST (= Tuesday afternoon in Europe and Tuesday morning in the States).
Forsaken hospitals, deserted amusement parks, forlorn mines, desolated resorts, rotting military bases, dilapidated factories, abandoned hotels, derelict train stations – you’ll see them all, and much more, on Abandoned Kansai!

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Japanese Sex Museum Revisited

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Chugoku, Haikyo, Japan, Museum, NSFW, Photography, Sex, Urbex, Video, Visited in 2012 on 2013/05/08| 10 Comments »

I visited the *Japanese Sex Museum* for the first time in March of 2012 – it was not only a very unique exploration, it was also a very long one, me spending about 4 hours in the pitch-black exhibition rooms.
About 2 months later *I went to Kyushu and failed miserably* when I was unable to find a hotel room due to Japan’s wanderlust during Golden Week. I can be quite persistent, so I went back down south a week or two later to explore the northern Kyushu locations I was eager to visit for quite a while. This time everything went according to plan, so my tour ended in Yamaguchi prefecture with half a day to spare. So I jumped on a train and went back to the Japanese Sex Museum.
A ton of people watched the walking tour video I shot there, but while the feedback was generally positive, some viewers thought that it was way too short, being only 6 minutes long. Open for constructive criticism my idea was to go back to the museum, shoot a longer video and maybe take some additional photos. In and out in an hour, two tops – I had been there just recently, how much could have changed in less than 2 months? Well… I left after four hours to catch my last train back to Osaka!

Interestingly enough not a lot changed. The place looked almost the same, except for one minor difference – somebody opened two doors, emergency exits, allowing not only some foliage to enter, but also a few rays of light. Not much, but enough to use natural light with the help of a tripod and long exposure times for almost every single photo. During my first visit I had to illuminate about 80% of the photos manually and individually with a flashlight since it was completely dark in most of the rooms. On my second visit the process was almost as time-consuming as before, but the photos looked completely different, even when I took pictures of the same objects. And so one hour turned into two turned into three turned into four…

This is actually more or less a photo and video update since I already wrote about the sex museum’s history in my previous article – and since nothing happened while I revisited the place, here is the new material for your viewing pleasure without further ado. Enjoy!

(If you don’t want to miss the latest article you can *follow Abandoned Kansai on Twitter* and *like this blog on Facebook* – and of course there is the *video channel on Youtube*…)

Addendum 2014-07-11: According to a friend of mine the museum has been demolished a while ago – R.I.P.!

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Saikaibashi Corazon Hotel Monorail

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Haikyo, Japan, Kyushu, Nagasaki, Photography, Transportation, Urbex, Visited in 2012 on 2013/04/30| 11 Comments »

The Saikaibashi Corazon Hotel Monorail is one of those surprise locations you stumble upon every once in a while. *A year ago during Golden Week* I was on my way to the *Saikaibashi Public Aquarium* and went down some steps minding my own business when all of a sudden I saw something overgrown through the bushes. At first I thought it was the entrance of the aquarium, but getting closer it was pretty clear that this was some abandoned transportation device. A red cabin with very dirty greenish windows. So my second idea (which lasted for the rest of the trip) was that this monorail granted access to the aquarium and therefore was somehow connected to it.

Well, I was wrong, in more than one way. First of all the Saikaibashi Corazon Hotel Monorail technically isn’t really a monorail, at least not in the modern way – it’s more like a slope car (スロープカー/ surōpukā), kind of a sub-category of modern monorails. At least the Japanese term is a brand name of Kaho Manufacturing, so it might not be the proper word to use either, but I guess we’ll go with it from now on.

Since I didn’t know what a slope car was I better give an explanation in case you don’t either. A slope car is a small automated monorail that provides accessibility for handicapped or elderly people, usually transporting them between entrance gates / parking lots / buildings by avoiding stairs at steep slopes. In 1966 Yoneyama Industry invented a fright-only monorail system to be used in mikan orchards (mikan are very delicious seedless and easy-peeling tangerines). A system to transport construction workers and lumberjacks was developed later, but it wasn’t until the 1990s when the system became popular for the general public when Kaho Manufacturing entered the market with great success in Japan and Korea, installing 80 slope cars of their Slope Car brand alone.

I don’t know when the Saikaibashi Corazon Hotel Monorail opened or closed, but I guess it was after 1990. In 1996 it was still operating as I found a report in Japanese written by a guest of the hotel. He was using the slope car at the Corazon Hotel not to reach the Saikaibashi Aquarium, which was already abandoned at the time, but to get to the waterfront below the hotel. From there guests of the Corazon Hotel were able to board a boat once or twice a day to get to the nearby and then quite popular Huis Ten Bosch amusement park, a Netherlands themed park; Nagasaki and the Netherland have a close common history of more than 400 years, sadly the theme park never lived up to that history and is in danger of becoming an abandoned place for about 10 years now – half its existence. I guess at one point in time after 1996 the boat connected to Huis Ten Bosch was cancelled and with that there was no use for the slope car (capacity: 12 people) since the aquarium was already close a long time ago…

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