Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Abandoned Tuberculosis Hospital For Children

2012/10/29 by Florian / Abandoned Kansai

„There is no vandalism in Japan!” is one of the most untrue urbex clichés – and whoever still thinks that I will prove wrong with this posting, especially when compared to the previous one. When I visited the *Tuberculosis Hospital For Children* for the first time three years ago it was hardly abandoned and barely touched. No signs of vandalism, no signs of protection. 8 days ago on the other hand…
When my haikyo buddy *Michael Gakuran* came to Kansai to explore my old urbex nemesis *Nara Dreamland* I was devastated I couldn’t join him since I made other plans for that day weeks ago. But I was free the next day, so we met up and I showed him my most closely guarded secret location, the abandoned tuberculosis sanatorium for children I visited and never talked about. Ever. To anybody.
Walking up a gentle slope I didn’t expect a lot of change. Sure, by now two Japanese explorers posted inside shots of the haikyo hospital, so there must be a way in now… But that’s it, right? WRONG!

Approaching the tuberculosis clinic the once locked gate was wide open… and 100 meters down the road we found a brand-new barricade. Well, it was brand-new at one point, now it was grotesquely bended and nevertheless almost flat on the ground. It actually looked like a truck ran over it. Again and again. Not one of those Japanese mini trucks! A massive, manly American one! Most windows of the building were boarded up – or smashed after somebody ripped off the solid wooden panels. A half-open box of plastic syringes was scattered in front of a side entrance and glass was basically everywhere. If I wouldn’t have known better I would have said that this location was abandoned forever and a day.
With all the doors broken up and half the windows smashed in, the Tuberculosis Hospital For Children was exposed to the weather for a couple of years – and it showed. A lot of rooms were moldy, in some the wallpapers were falling off already. To make things worse the hordes of vandals (or a single very serious one!) emptied several fire extinguishers in several key rooms (like the radiology and the laboratory), making it hard to breathe after a short while. And of course some areas were swarmed by gnats, but that’s kind of a given for abandoned places in Japan during autumn…
Although the concrete building featured quite a few glass fronts, a couple of areas were still boarded up and therefore dark; darker than a black steer’s tookus on a moonless prairie night. I didn’t expect that and left spare batteries for my flashlight at home, which didn’t influence the photo shooting, but the second video I took for your viewing pleasure.

Exploring an abandoned place I always try to relate to the place I visit – which wasn’t exactly easy at a tuberculosis clinic for children, especially since I just read an article about the Goiania accident in the Brazilian city of Goiânia. (In 1987 two metal thieves stole a cylinder from an abandoned hospital. They punctured it and scooped out some grams of a glowing substance before selling everything to a nearby scrapyard. There the cylinder was opened and people loved the fascinating material they’ve never seen before and spread it all over town by taking some home. To make a long story short – the substance was cesium chloride, a highly radioactive inorganic compound. To this very day the accident is considered one of the most catastrophic nuclear disasters; 4 people dies, more than 110.000 were examined for radioactive contamination.) So here I was, strolling through an abandoned hospital, fascinated by the countless medical equipment that was left behind…
The Tuberculosis Hospital For Children turned out to be a treasure chest of objects big and small. While some rooms were (almost) completely empty, like the swimming pool and the cafeteria, others were stuffed with analysers, boxes of laboratory glassware and even private items like photos and drawings. Without a doubt one of the highlights was right next to the pool, a small room full of boxes containing envelopes filled with X-rays, MRIs and CTs – all of them taken at a hospital in Osaka, which kind of leads to the conclusion that Tuberculosis Hospital For Children was just an extension of a much larger clinic probably still existing… (More about the hospital haikyo’s history in a future posting, this is all about the exploration!)
Pretty much all of the images came with handwritten doctor’s notes, some of them bilingual (Japanese and English). *Michael* seemed to be quite fascinated by the found, so I left for the other building and only took a few quick shots right before we left. It’s a strange feeling going through other people’s medical files, picking up radiographs of potentially terminally ill people and holding them against the sun to take a photo – most of the MRIs seemed to be of adults, but especially the roentgenograms of kids were… eerie.
The massive concrete construction housing the hospital was connected by a bridge with a rather narrow lightweight building (remember the *previous article*?). Typical Japanese architecture of the 1940s / 50s with walls you could punch through. The floor was kind of yielding, but the huge hornets (or maybe suzumebachi?) flying through the smashed windows made my hurry anyway. As expected the lightweight building turned out to be rather unspectacular. One part was in catastrophic condition, so I didn’t even try to enter it. The rest was a couple of bathrooms, lots of empty rooms and some storage rooms – most likely the school part of the hospital in the 40s before it got its own building down the road. But like I said, that’s a story for another time…

(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*…)

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Haikyo, Hospital, Japan, Kansai, Osaka, Photography, Urbex, Video, Visited in 2012 | 21 Comments »

Japanese Tuberculosis Hospital For Children

2012/10/22 by Florian / Abandoned Kansai

Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Kentucky is without a doubt the most famous abandoned tuberculosis sanatorium in world (directly followed by the Beelitz-Heilstätten in Berlin), but a rather small Kansai clinic abandoned 20 years ago is slowly rising to fame – the Japanese Tuberculosis Hospital For Children in Osaka. (Of course the official name was euphemistic and translated to something like “Osaka City Resort House For Children”…)

I first visited the Japanese Tuberculosis Hospital For Children almost three years ago – the third abandoned place I’ve ever been to and the first I took video of. So please excuse the quality of both the stills as well as the film material. Back then I had no clue what I was doing… Hell, I barely knew the term haikyo! (Japanese for “ruin” and used as a synonym for urban exploration.)

It was an exciting time, my second day of urban exploration. Back then I spent countless hours doing research on locations and somehow I stumbled across this clinic nobody seemed to know about. It took almost two years after my visit till it appeared on a Japanese blog and almost three before it appeared on another one – and I guess that’s it, from now on it’s only a matter of time until the once secret place becomes public knowledge…

When I walked up to the clinic I had no idea what to expect. I didn’t even know how to enter the premises and if I was at the right location. I found a hole in the fence guarding an overgrown area, so I slipped through – the first time I ever slipped through a fence to get to an abandoned building. Sadly the terrain was so overgrown that I had to retreat and find another way in. So I followed several roads and small paths, slipped past a closed gate with my heart beating like crazy and then it finally appeared through the bushes, the Japanese Tuberculosis Hospital For Children.

I approached the building carefully since I read somewhere that it was still used on weekends for emergency drills. And indeed I heard some sounds from the first floor. Not voices, but machinery; probably some kind of generator. I calmed down a little bit and explored the area. All doors were locked and the shades of all windows I could get close to were down. Some doors had glass elements and looking through them I could see that the interior was spare, but in good condition. No signs of vandalism whatsoever – which kind of confirmed the claim that the building complex was only part-time abandoned. So I took a couple of photos and short videos before I got the heck out of there, keeping the location to myself , trying to prevent it from being damaged…

Recently I revisited the Japanese Tuberculosis Hospital For Children *haikyo* – what I found when I returned I will write about in the near future. If you would like to have a sneak peak please *like Abandoned Kansai on Facebook*, where I will post a short preview later this week. I’m sure it’ll send a shiver down your spine!

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

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Haikyo, Hospital, Japan, Kansai, Osaka, Urbex, Video, Visited in 2009 | 8 Comments »

Japanese Ghost Town Mukainokura (向之倉)

2012/10/16 by Florian / Abandoned Kansai

Mukainokura is probably the most famous ghost town in all of Japan as it was featured in many books and by many websites. It is also quite easily accessible by ghost village standards – it’s less than 10 kilometers away from the next train station (more like 6 km actually) and you can drive right up to it if you have a car. And since it’s on top of a hill in the mountains of Shiga prefecture, there are millions of potential visitors from all over Kansai.

Mukainokura was the first ghost town I ever visited, back in the spring of 2010 – and the last location I ever visited with my colleague and dear friend *Enric*, since only weeks later his fugue kicked in and he left the company we both worked for back then.

Spending a sunny spring day hiking with a friend in the Japanese countryside is as good as a day can get in my book. And so Enric and I passed several beautiful temples, shrines and rice fields on our way to the mountains. Back then there was way less information about Mukainokura on the internet, including GoogleMaps, so of course we overshot the side road taking us to the deserted town by a couple of kilometers. After walking back on the beautiful valley road along a small river we finally hiked up the mountain. Almost 200 meters height difference on a length of about 700 or 800 meters – I can see why that village was abandoned! The location was beautiful, but going up and down that slope on a daily basis must have been a pain… Which applies to a lot of villages in the area, about a dozen, all abandoned. Mukainokura is just the most famous one.

Mukainokura was founded halfway through Japan’s most famous era, the Edo Period (or Tokugawa Period), in the early 18th century. Back then people were living off agriculture and by producing charcoal. Growing slowly for one and a half centuries Mukainokura was home to 95 people in 1880, living in about 20 houses. Although in the 1920s the production of ogatan, Japanese charcoal briquettes made from sawdust, brought a more advanced source of income to Mukainokura, the number of inhabitants decreased quickly when gas, oil and electricity replaced charcoal everywhere in Japan after World War 2 – and younger people moved from mountain towns to the big cities in the plains. Mukainokura had:
52 inhabitants in 1960
43 inhabitants in 1965 (12 households – 17 male, 26 female)
10 inhabitants in 1970 (3 households – 5 male, 5 female)
3 inhabitants in 1975 (2 households – 2 male, 1 female)
2 inhabitants in 1980 (2 households – 1 male, 1 female)
0 inhabitants in 1985

After more than 25 years of abandonment there was not much left of Mukainokura. About a dozen wooden houses (half of them completely collapsed, the other half partly), scattered across an area of several hundred square meters, connected by tiny paths, short staircases and terraces. More than two dozen winters with heavy snowfalls left the remaining houses in a dilapidated state – beyond repair actually. Nevertheless a couple of houses were still accessible and full of everyday items like magazines, china, photos, bottles, boxes and cans.

I guess in 2010 Mukainokura had more visitors than in 1980. During our two hour long visit Enric and I ran into four different groups having a look at the abandoned town. From a elderly couple that might have been born here to an early twen couple wearing designer clothes – the guy behind the wheel of the sports car showing his trophy girlfriend the spooky dark side of their home country… All of them were driving up the paved road, not walking, like us and for centuries the inhabitants of Mukainokura did.

The two most vivid memories I have of Mukainokura involved nature though. When Enric and I strolled through the ghostly remains of the village Enric spotted a wild monkey in the forest. It was ignoring us completely, minding its own business – sadly I wasn’t able to get a photo of the furry fella. Right before we were leaving Mukainokura we were following signs to the Ido Jinja, the “Well Shrine” (井戸神社). Turns out that this shrine near Mukainokura’s well is quite famous till this very day, featuring signs that were clearly put up after Mukainokura was abandoned (one was dated, 1991, others looked even newer). The shrine was (and is) accompanied by a Katsura tree 39 meters tall and 11.6 meters in girth, according to the sign 400 years old. A wonderfully tranquil place and the perfect location to stop by before heading home…

(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*…)

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Haikyo, Hiking, House, Japan, Kansai, Shiga, Urbex, Visited in 2010 | 11 Comments »

Saikaibashi Public Aquarium

2012/10/09 by Florian / Abandoned Kansai

If you are a regular reader of this blog you might remember my *rant about Golden Week* a while ago. To refresh your memory: I went to Kyushu for some urban exploration – my plan was to stay for four days, but I had to return to Kansai the same day, because I couldn’t find a hotel room; partly because I’m Caucasian, probably because my Japanese skills are limited.

Between the devastating news from the Sasebo Tourist Information Center (their staff was great though!) and me returning home I visited the abandoned Saikaibashi Public Aquarium, a location that gained quite a bit of popularity on Japanese *haikyo* blogs recently.

Sadly only a couple of urban exploration blogs, Western as well as Japanese, really care about the history of the places they present – a fact that sometimes makes it tough for yours truly to give you proper facts about the places I showcase on Abandoned Kansai. I’ve seen a really old photo of the aquarium taken in summer of 1965, so it’s pretty safe to say that it was in business already back then. The oldest photos of the abandoned aquarium dated as far back as 1996 – and on those photos the place already looked like nobody took care of it for a decade or two. The small floating platform in front of the aquarium did not have the wood and barbed wire installation yet, and the handrail on the waterfront was still there, but the concrete holding it up was already severely damaged.

I can’t remember the last time I’ve been to a public aquarium still in business, but passing by the ones on *Mount Yashima* and the Kaiyukan in Osaka (which is one of the biggest aquariums in the world) I was under the impression that those installations are pretty big. The Saikaibashi Public Aquarium wasn’t big at all. Probably 6 or 7 meters by 35 meters, 2 floors (steps, no elevator). There was one huge tank combining both floors and several smaller ones on each floor. None of them were filled with water, hardly any had intact windows. The amount of vandalism was severe – no graffiti, but most of the smashable items were destroyed. The building being exposed to the elements didn’t help either – even on the upper level the massive concrete floor felt kind of unsteady due to the damages done in the past decades. And outside it was more than clearly visible how fragile concrete can be: the bridge leading to the aquarium collapsed at two different segments and I really hope nobody was walking there when it happened. Which is rather likely since I’ve seen photos of the intact bridge that weren’t that old – maybe 1.5 or 2 years. The chance that a fellow explorer took an involuntary bath is rather high…

What really surprised me, not to say shock me, was a fact I found out about only after I visited the Saikaibashi Public Aquarium. As small as the aquarium was, it seems like the main attraction of the place was a dolphin show! The now broken bridge, fitted with metal grids, limited an area known as the “Dolphin’s Cove” (イルカの池), show time was at 10:00, 12:00, 14:00 as well as at 16:00 on normal weekdays and at 10:30, 12:00, 13:30, 15:00 and at 16:30 on weekends, public holidays and during the six week long school summer break that to the best of my knowledge usually starts in July when the weather becomes too hot and humid to spend time in a building without AC, which applies for most Japanese schools.

Though small and vandalized, the one hour I had to explore and document the Saikaibashi Public Aquarium felt a bit short. How often do you have the chance to visit an abandoned aquarium? But at that point I was still hoping to get a hotel room in Fukuoka, so I had to leave prematurely and hurry to save my third Kyushu trip…

(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*…)

Posted in Abandoned, Amusement Park, Animals, Aquarium, Asia, Haikyo, Japan, Kyushu, Nagasaki, Urbex, Video, Visited in 2012 | 14 Comments »

Kurhaus Sand / Hotel Sand

2012/10/01 by Florian / Abandoned Kansai

Since I’ve been terribly busy recently both at work and with several urbex projects / explorations it sadly has to be a short article this week; a location that took me just a couple of minutes to shoot, actually – the Kurhaus Sand (or Hotel Sand).

When I went on vacation to Germany in summer this year I met up with a kindergarten friend of mine, Nina. She became a regular reader of this blog and was eager to explore with me, so I planned a daytrip to the Schwarzwald (Black Forest) area of Germany. I had several leads there and thanks to an early start we managed to visit 7 (!) different locations on one day – possible only because some of them weren’t accessible; one of them being the Kurhaus Sand. Strangely enough a name that works both in English and German, but since kurhaus isn’t nearly as common as kindergarten let me give you a quick translation: health resort.

And that’s basically what the Kurhaus Sand was – a health resort in one of Germany’s most beautiful regions, the Black Forest. Not much more than a couple of houses in the middle of nowhere, Sand isn’t even a village. Its origin though is the now abandoned kurhaus. Around 1845 a mountain shelter was build on sandy soil (hence the name Sand, which means sand… Captain Obvious strikes again!) as a refugee for forestry workers. A couple of years later somebody started to sell beverages, with little success (the hut was subsidized by the city…), but after some state investments in 1874 the hut was turned into an inn under the direction of the retired country constable Josef Martin Weis at the age of 57. The place became more and more popular amongst hikers and in 1884 the previous head chef August Maier became the new tenant. In the early 1890s Maier bought, enlarged and enhanced the inn and re-opened it as the Kurhaus Sand in the presence of Frederick II, Grand Duke of Baden – the last Grand Duke of Baden. The area continued to thrive, so around 1920 a gas station was added, in 1930 a post office opened and in 1936 a police station started its service. During those days the ownership of the Kurhaus Sand changed several times, but I’ll spare you the details.

Nowadays all of these installations are closed. Only the 1949 opened Bergwaldhütte (Mountain Forest Hut), a convalescent home for children and later for policemen, is still in business – offering food and drinks for all travelers coming through on the popular Schwarzwaldhochstraße (Black Forest High Street).

When Nina and I drove up to the Kurhaus Sand we were forced to stay inside the car for a couple of minutes as a cloudburst made it impossible to start our exploration right away. When we were finally able to get close we were still not sure if the Kurhaus Sand was really abandoned or not as the place isn’t really popular amongst German urban explorers. The building was in pretty good condition, but since there was no activity during a time that is considered the busiest vacation time in Germany it must have been abandoned… We were able to walk around the building clockwise once – no signs of anybody, no signs of vandalism, but also no way to enter the building…

It wasn’t until my return to Japan that I found out that a family named Wiedemann were the owners of the Kurhaus Sand from the 1930s on. In 1977 Günter Milz took over and turned the place into a popular destination for day trippers – he modernized the hotel part (baths, elevator, …) and his restaurant became famous for the cuisine of Baden; like Flädlesuppe, Käsespätzle, Maultaschen and Schupfnudeln. Milz retired in 1994, but I couldn’t find any information about the almost 20 years since then. Given the decent condition the Kurhaus Sand is still in it must have been opened for business for another couple of years, but who knows? Thanks to its remote condition hardly anybody would go there just to vandalize it… Luckily there are many local historians in Germany – maybe one of them finds this article and can add some information?

Posted in Abandoned, Baden-Württemberg, Europe, Germany, Haikyo, Hiking, Hotel / Ryokan, Urbex, Visited in 2012 | 11 Comments »

World Peace Giant Kannon

2012/09/24 by Florian / Abandoned Kansai

Ruins in Japan are often in such good condition that they are not recognizable as ruins at first sight. One example would be the World Peace Giant Kannon on Awaji Island, Hyogo prefecture – Kannon not being a spelling mistake, but the Japanese name for the bodhisattva associated with compassion, Guanyin. Other spellings include Kan’on, Kanzeon and Kwannon with the latter being the name giver for Canon, which was founded as Kwanon in 1934 and had the bodhisattva in its logo. I guess a World Peace Giant Cannon only exists in the minds of some really crazy people…

In 2010 I actually drove past the 80 meters tall World Peace Giant Kannon on its 20 meters tall socket building. Sure, it looked interesting, but the bright white statue seemed to be rather new in the warm sunlight of that day, so I didn’t even consider stopping. When I got back home and looked up what the statue really was I found out that most important of all it was abandoned… (It’s the 4th tallest statue in Japan and the 13th tallest in the world. Including the socket it ranks 3 and 10.)

The World Peace Giant Kannon is actually part of the Heiwa Kannon Temple (heiwa meaning peace…), which was founded and funded by Toyokichi Okunai, a realtor who became rich dealing with office buildings, private apartments and business hotels in Osaka. The basis is a 5 storey building, 20 meters tall. The first floor was home to all kinds of religious exhibits as well as well as information about the famous Shikoku Pilgrimage (consisting of 88 temples along a 1200 kilometers long hiking course which usually takes between 30 and 60 days to complete). The other floors were stuffed with Mr. Okunai’s private collections – transportation, watches, china, art, armors. The fourth floor was home to a sightseeing restaurant, a banquet hall and a souvenir shop. If you look up the 80 meters tall statue on top of the building you can see some kind of a “collar” right below the statue’s head – that turned out to be an observation platform.

Although attracting up to 2000 visitors per day it seems like a lot of people were appalled by this mix of religion and commerce, some even accused Mr. Okunai of heresy. When Mr. Okunai died in 1988 his wife took over the management of the World Peace Giant Kannon until her death in February of 2006. After her death the Okunais’ real estate company closed the place right away and the Heiwa Kannon Temple started to fall in disrepair quickly, probably due to the lack of management of Mrs. Okunai during her final years. The Lehman Brothers took over, but they failed badly themselves at the time. Put to auction several times in 2007 and 2008 by the Kobe District Court nobody bid any money (which reminds me of the *Former Iranian Consulate* in Kobe…), so the temple was shifted to a separate company in September 2008. Since the World Peace Giant Kannon was liable to collapse (its exterior is molded of gypsum and resulted in the statue’s nickname Whiplash Kannon”) a committee was established in May 2009 by the local government, which took measures against the further deterioration of both the World Peace Giant Kannon and the nearby 10-storey pagoda in September of 2011. Just a couple of months after my buddy Gianluigi and I explored the place…

Walking up to the Heiwa Kannon Temple is actually quite impressive. The huge pagoda is right next to a parking lot and a closed restaurant. From there we had to walk up a hill to the back of the socket building. There we found all kinds of statues and items that didn’t go together very well, including a miniature version of the Statue of Liberty and an original Class D51 steam locomotive, the D51 828. We circled the socket building quickly and found an easy entry. The first floor was almost empty as most religious exhibits were gone. A quick look at the office on that floor didn’t give us much insight, so we headed up one of two staircases (one in the north, one in the south) that connected the floors. Some of them were locked, but we gained access to the restaurant on the fourth floor and the tatami room on the fifth floor. Approaching the fifth floor we heard voices, so we talked loudly to make ourselves heard. A minute or two later a young couple in their early 20s rushed past us, the guy holding a photo camera and the girl’s clothes not really being in order – your guess here is as good as mine…

The tatami room once held the Mr. Okunai’s armor, but nowadays well armored soldiers of another kind were all over the floor: suzumebachi, Japanese Giant Hornets, 5 centimeters long killer machines. Luckily they were dead and it wasn’t summer yet, so Gian and I concentrated on the task at hand. In one of the hallways leading to the staircases we found an elevator – and nearby a mysterious claustrophobically narrow und pitch-black staircase that began to wind upwards. After spending a couple of minutes on the rooftop of the socket building admiring the beautiful gigantic Kannon statue we headed back inside and up the staircase. It was dark, the air was bad and some door-like openings revealed unpleasant views at the inside of the statue – even without knowing that people were discussing repairing the Kannon it was pretty clear that investments were necessary. After climbing stairs for about 10 minutes (it felt much longer…) we finally reached the observation platform, which offered both stunning and scary views. The location of the World Peace Giant Kannon between the coast of Awaji Island and the gentle hills was breathtaking – and so were the cracks in the gypsum everywhere. Buildings in Japan are barely constructed for eternity, but this one definitely has seen better days!

And so Gian and I walked down stairs for about 85 meters and left after spending surprisingly much time at this obviously quite popular abandoned statue – passing the also abandoned pagoda a group of about half a dozen Japanese twens was walking up the hill to have a look themselves. And I am sure they weren’t the last visitors as the maintenance work at the Heiwa Kannon Temple started not earlier than four months later…

(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*…)

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Haikyo, Hyogo, Japan, Kansai, Museum, Restaurant, Sacred Site, Urbex, Video, Visited in 2011 | 10 Comments »

Shimizu Onsen Center – An Abandoned Japanese Spa

2012/09/18 by Florian / Abandoned Kansai

The Shimizu Onsen Center was the last stop on a road trip to Shikoku my buddy Gianluigi and I did in the spring of 2011. Usually I write a short road trip summary in advance, but these days I’m a bit busy, so maybe I’ll make up leeway some day in the future – after all it was quite a busy road trip with six locations in two days.

Onsen is the Japanese term for hot spring, but usually it is more about the hotel / restaurant that is making use of the water. The Shimizu Onsen Center is one of those hidden gems of the beaten tracks deep in the mountains of Shikoku – and the name is just perfect, because shimizu actually means “pure water”. Pure water that won’t be soiled by many visitors, because the Shimizu Onsen Center closed a couple of years ago. If you try to find some information about it yourself, make sure to not confuse it with several other towns named Shimizu all over Japan (like in Fukui, Hokkaido, Kochi, Shizuoka, and Wakayama). You can imagine that the name is quite popular…

When Gian and I drove onto the already slightly overgrown parking lot we had no idea at all what expect – I had never seen photos of the Shimizu Onsen Center and I’ve never seen any since I’ve been there, so please consider it an original find that hasn’t appeared on any blog about Japanese ruins, neither in English nor in Japanese. As we got out of the car it just started to rain and we were pretty tired after a series of exciting but energy-sapping explorations. Nevertheless we closed in quickly, but carefully, just in case the low buildings nearby were home to some curious spectators. But we were lucky and able to enter the Shimizu Onsen Center without trouble of any kind. Not only that, but there was a note taped to the entry glass door of the spa, explaining a little bit about the place’s history. According to this it was opened in 1981 and operated for 14 years before it was sold to a new owner. Financial trouble began in 2003 and in late November of 2007 the place closed with 160 million Yen of debt – just three and a half years before Gian and I visited.

The Shimizu Onsen Center was fed by a sodium hydrogen carbonate spring with a temperature of 17 degrees Celsius, helpful to treat rheumatism, neuralgia, diabetes, and skin diseases. It targeted mainly day-trippers and tourists who booked accommodations nearby. Opening hours were from 9 a.m. till 9 p.m. (closed every 1st and 3rd Thursday of each month) and the entrance fee was 600 Yen. In the northern part I found a couple of Japanese style guest rooms with tatami mats and small TVs, but I’m not sure if they were used for overnight stays or just to relax between two baths.

Gian and I entered through the normal entrance on the second floor and went straight downstairs to the first floor, where the baths were. Both the one for males as well as the ones for females were equipped with a sauna and featured several frog statues. The Japanese word for frog is “kaeru”, which can also mean “to return”, and that made them good luck charms / symbols for money and coming back safely. This floor also featured the already mentioned guest rooms, which could be reached through a very, very dark hallway. The whole floor and all the items there looked a bit old and run down (like the massage chairs in the hallway and vending machine for razors), but there were no signs of vandalism or theft.

That also applied for the second floor with the front desk and a huge tatami room with a stage – a typical Japanese party room for long karaoke sessions with dozens of attendees. The tiny coop next to the stage even still had all the music equipment including countless tapes. No vandalism, no theft. In the entrance area we found a bin stuffed with umbrellas, slippers were still lined up and the front desk was neat and tidy.

The rather small third floor was exciting and disappointing at the same time. On the one hand the former bar was removed and so were the arcade machines that one day must have been there. On the other hand I finally found some dead animals, in amazingly good condition actually. Two skeletonized birds and a rat with some of the skin left, surrounded and partly covered by dead maggots. One of the bird skeletons was on the stairs on the way up, but the other one was just a couple of centimeters away from the rat – it looked like hunter and prey died at the same time at the same place. And that rat was huge! Maybe 30 centimeters long, and by that I mean the body alone. Since it was grey outside and I had to bring my tripod for the interior shots anyway I set up my little equipment to a comfortable height and zoomed to get a decent picture, being the lazy photographer I am sometimes. I was aware that the exposure time was rather long (a quarter of a second), but I didn’t realize that I zoomed to a point where gravity took over and the lens continued to zoom on its own – and so I accidentally created one of my favorite photos ever, one that still makes me a bit dizzy to this very day. Excited by this new discovery (commonly known as radial blur) I took some additional similar shots with both the rat skeleton and the bird skeleton next to it before we finally ran out of time – we were in the middle of nowhere in Shikoku on a rainy day and had less than 3.5 hours to get the car back to the rental company. Which really reminded me of my *first trip to Shikoku*, but this time the car rental was in Osaka, not in Kobe – and due to Golden Week the roads were a lot busier…

(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*…)

Posted in Abandoned, Animals, Asia, Haikyo, Japan, Shikoku, Spa / Onsen, Tokushima, Urbex, Video, Visited in 2011 | Leave a Comment »

Okunoshima – The Rabbit Island

2012/09/14 by Florian / Abandoned Kansai

Okunoshima is urban exploration for beginners. Actually it’s more like a vacation day than urbex – with an inglorious past, probably one of the darkest chapters in Japan’s history. And it’s an island with many names. In Japan Okunoshima (大久野島) is famous as usagi shima (ウサギ島), Rabbit Island. People with a more twisted look at life call it Poison Gas Island, though the Japanese term doku gas shima (毒ガス島) is way less common – but I doubt that this is the result of a more positive Japanese mindset…

Located in the Seto Inland Sea about 50 kilometers east of Hiroshima Okunoshima disappeared before if became famous. Back in the 1920s Japan signed the Geneva Protocol of 1925 that banned the use of chemical and biological weapons – but it didn’t say anything about development, production, storage or transfer. At the time being up to no good and started making trouble in the neighborhood, Japan immediately began to take advantage of that loophole. And with that Japan became the only country to use chemical weapons  in World War II, killing an estimated 80.000 Chinese soldiers and civilians according to historian Chi Hsueh-jen! (Not only with the knowledge, but with the permission of Emperor Hirohito… which probably should have lead to his prosecution as a war criminal. Sadly, hard evidence was found only decades later by Yoshiaki Yoshimi, a professor of modern Japanese history at the prestigious Chuo University and a founding member of the “Center for Research and Documentation on Japan’s War Responsibility”. My deep respect for the man, I’m sure his research made him more enemies than friends…)
The location of choice was the small and barely known island of Okunoshima, off the beaten tracks in case of a major accident, but still close enough to the important military city Hiroshima. From 1927 to 1929 an existing fish cannery on Okunoshima was “modernized” with a desalination plant, a refrigeration system and a power plant – and at the same time all foxes, martens, cats and rats were systematically eradicated. Okunoshima was erased from maps and Japan did everything to keep its existence a secret. Shipping routes were changed and trains along the coast had to close their window shutters, so did ferries passing the island. Plain-clothed members of the infamous Japanese military police kempeitai made sure everybody followed those rules and didn’t dare to sneak a peek. To avoid any activity on Okunoshima being seen from mainland Japan the old fish cannery was blown up, keeping the new installations intact – and the old pier in the west was replaced by a new one further south, closer to the research and production facilities. Huge storages for gigantic tanks were carved into the mountain and the soil was used to create ramparts as visual covers. In 1929 production began with high secrecy and under horrible conditions.

Since most of Japan’s leading scientists were under the supervision of western secret services they couldn’t be involved directly in the top secret base on Okunoshima. Production had to be executed by educated amateurs. Most of them were Korean forced laborers who worked in the production of medicine or soap before, locals looking for a good salary – and later on the military pressured more than 1000 local high school students into working on Okunoshima; at first only those with good grades in natural sciences, in the final years of WWII pretty much everybody available. The workers were given protective suits that weren’t really protective because the aggressive chemicals made the PVC brittle – thousands were injured because of that and during accidents, many died of their injuries because there were no doctors on the island and nobody was allowed to seek medical help on the Japanese mainland for the reason of secrecy. The production halls were cold in winter and smoldering in summer. Imagine wearing a plastic suit in a climate that sometimes makes it hard to breathe even when in shorts and T-shirt…

About 6.600 tons of mustard gas (Yperite), lewisite, phosgene and other poison gases were produced and stored temporarily on Okunoshima between 1929 and 1944 before being put to use by the Japanese military. While the gases were tested on rabbits on Okunoshima the scientists there worked together with the infamous *Unit 731* on at least two occasions in 1940 and 1943 – they tested mustard gas on Chinese prisoners. (In case you don’t know Unit 731: Have a look at Wikipedia and make sure you don’t wanna eat soon. Their initiator and commanding officer *Shiro Ishii* was one of the most despicable people to ever walk on this planet, the Japanese Josef Mengele, maybe even worse – but thanks to some Americans, especially from Fort Detrick, the weasel was never prosecuted, although he should have been executed for his war crimes. Ishii didn’t even have to flee Japan since he was able to negotiate immunity for himself and his closest allies. Instead he lived a peaceful life with his family until is death in 1959 at age 67.)

After World War II ended in 1945 the remaining poison gas was dumped in the ocean, buried or burned – the factories were blown up or used as housing or storage (e.g. for ammunition during the Korean War). This was done by Japanese contractors under the supervision of the Americans, but what happened to the rabbits used as laboratory animals is rather unclear. Some say they were released by workers after the Japanese military left the island – others claim that they were all killed by the American military and the current rabbits on Okunoshima are descendants of a dozen pets released by a Japanese school class in 1972. One thing is for sure: Since all natural enemies of the rodents were killed in the late 1920s they don’t have to fear any predators and so they breed like… well… rabbits.

Okunoshima stayed a forgotten island for a few decades until in 1988 something unusual happened, at least by Japanese standards: A poison gas museum opened on the Poison Gas Island. Of course emphasizing the harsh conditions for the workers in the factory, because as everybody knows, at least everybody educated by the Japanese school system: Japan was the victim of WWII. Well, sadly that is the common self-awareness, which explains South Park episodes like Whale Whores (and Chinpokomon…) – episodes that show an understanding of Japan most people, including Japanese, don’t have. And so all the photos of poison gas inflicted wounds in the 2 room museum are not from WWII, but from the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988. And while most ruins on Okunoshima have signs in Japanese and English (which is quite commendable since it’s unusual for any location that far off the beaten tracks!) the ones at the museum are mostly in Japanese only. (Which reminds me of the Peace Center in Osaka, where most of the surprisingly critical exhibits are labeled in Japanese only while all the others are bilingual, Japanese and English – shamed be he who thinks evil of it…)

Nowadays Okunoshima is a popular tourist spot, visited by about 100.000 people a year, many of them staying overnight at the hotel or the camping ground on the island. Not so much because of the poison gas factory ruins or the museum, but because of the rabbits. Like I said, no predators, so 100s of them are roaming freely, probably making Okunoshima the world’s largest petting zoo. Usually when I am on my way to an abandoned place and there is some noise in the bushes close-by it’s a snake. Or a boar. Or a monkey. Maybe even a bear. On Okunoshima it’s a rabbit. Or a bunch of them. Charging at any person that is passing by, hoping for some food. And they are so adorable! I came for the ruins, but I stayed for the rabbits. Seriously, I spent much more time taking photos of rabbits than taking photos of ruins – when I found out that there were remains of a Meiji era fort from the Russo-Japanese War of 1904/05 I almost considered it a burden, not another photo opportunity…

Pretty much all rabbits on Okunoshima are hand-tame. The ones near the ferry terminals and the hotel are by far the biggest ones. I’m sure they get fed 24/7! If you like your rabbits smaller and a little bit more shy I recommend going off the beaten tracks – to the tennis courts (de-facto abandoned, at least some of them), to the former gunpowder storage or any trail up the mountain. Don’t worry, even there you don’t have to look for rabbits… they will find you! (And you don’t have to worry about snakes, boars, monkeys or bears – you are not even allowed to bring cats or dogs to the island.)

As for my day on Okunoshima: I did a full circle, starting at ferry terminal 2 and ending at ferry terminal 1, since I left on the second to last boat departing from the island; you can *have a look at GoogleMaps* as Okunoshima is a tourist attraction. And I refrained from renting a bike, because I wanted to take my time and enjoy the relaxing atmosphere on the island. The weather started out sunny and ended overcast, poison for photography, but surprisingly I didn’t mind. All of a sudden I didn’t care that much for the gas factory ruins. Many of them were fenced off by ridiculously low bars, but for once I did respect those barriers that were more symbolic than effective. After learning about the place’s history all those chunks of concrete blackened with soot weren’t that important anymore. Okunoshima’s history was just overwhelming. Why disrespect a place that saw and caused so much pain and suffering? When at the same time you can spend a relaxing day at the beach and play with cute little bunnies!

Going to Okunoshima was a wonderful experience and I kind of left with a heavy heart – I visited in spring on a warm day, probably still a little bit too cold to go swimming, and I had plans for the next day. But if you ever have the chance to go to Okunoshima from late spring to early autumn make sure to bring a loved one (as well as your kids, if you have some) and stay overnight at the hotel – just make sure to make a reservation months ahead as the hotel is very busy. Unless you are afraid of ghosts and fear that hordes of Chinese war victims, Japanese workers and laboratory rabbits will haunt you…

(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*…)

Oh, before I forget: A shortened German version of this article, “Die Insel der Versuchskaninchen / Okunoshima – Zwischen Giftgas und Kaninchen” (The Island of Guinea Pigs / Okunoshima – Between Poison Gas and Rabbits), was published on Spiegel Online / einestages on Monday – you can *read it here*.

Posted in Abandoned, Animals, Asia, Chugoku, Demolished, Depot, Factory, Haikyo, Hiking, Hiroshima, Japan, Map, Military, Power Station, Spiegel Online, Urbex, Video, Visited in 2012 | 5 Comments »

Japanese Strip Club

2012/09/10 by Florian / Abandoned Kansai

Strip clubs in Japan are a mystery to most foreigners. Most likely because of the language barrier – I guess the average tourist isn’t wiling to risk spending unknown amounts of money for drinks and other services; especially if they don’t know what services are available or if they are even welcome. Reports about foreigners not being allowed to enter onsen, brothels or strip clubs are almost as old as reports about foreigners being allowed to enter Japan again (i.e. 160 years…). I guess most foreigners, especially tourists, don’t even know where to find strip clubs in Japan. For that reason the two abandoned and gutted by fire strip clubs in the outskirts of Nagoya and Tokyo might be the most famous ones. But the one I want to present you today might be the new frontrunner…

Sex sells, even urban exploration. My article about the abandoned *Japanese Sex Museum* half a year ago was a pleasant success and it wouldn’t surprise me if some other websites would pick up on this little countryside gem, too – this abandoned Japanese strip club is in amazing condition, hardly known to the net and barely known even amongst Japanese urban explorers.

Like the Japanese Sex Museum I’ve seen the Japanese Strip Club maybe three or four times in three years on Japanese haikyo blogs. That’s it. Usually photos taken from the outside, at the entrance area and at a small stage. Because of that my expectations were rather low when I hit the road with my local urbex buddy Dan and two of his friends to go to a small onsen town in the mountains of Okayama. Luckily one of the Japanese blogs didn’t hesitate to throw out all kinds of information about the location of the strip club, so it was easy to find. Sadly it didn’t give any hard facts about the place, so I can’t tell you much about its history.

The official name of the strip club was a euphemism, like so often when it comes to the sex industry in Japanese spa towns. The sex museum was called “House of Hidden Treasures” – and this strip club was a “Sightseeing Theater”. I’m sure the sights to see were pretty awesome, but the name was kind of misleading as it implied fun for the whole family…

Well, at least our group had fun, although I have to admit that I never really “got” the place, never connected with it. I felt like a creep creeping around this creepy place. It was an interesting exploration though, because the photos I had seen of the place made up for maybe half of its size. Walking up the staircase covered by plastic sheets we quickly reached the entrance, out of sight from the busy street and a nosy neighbor, who had a good look at our little group when we approached the “sightseeing theater”. It seems like the entrance fee was 3000 Yen – and since the door was locked we looked for alternative ways to get in. To the right was a side entrance that lead directly to the oh so known strip room with its orange stage and the countless tine stool bolted to the ground. Well, countless, I guess there were about 150 of them, sometimes as little as maybe 15 centimeters between them. Thinking that in the probably not so distant past they were occupied by cigarette smoking sweaty horny men staring at naked women was quite surreal in the light of day. While I was taking photos of the room my companions went backstage and stayed there surprisingly long. It turned out that although we’ve already seen everything I’ve seen on the internet didn’t mean that we’ve seen everything there was. Behind the stage was a small room with a bed and from there a dark, narrow hallway with an uncomfortably soft floor lead to another part of the building, a part that was actually even closer to the locked main entrance. When I got out of the dark I stepped directly… onto a stage. A stage way bigger in a room way bigger than I just left. While the first location was a little bit shabby and tacky with plastic flowers everywhere and gigantic eagles painted on the wall the second room was… actually pretty similar; just bigger, more spacious and in better condition, probably thanks to the wallpaper that was missing in the other room. Close to the stage were the same tiny little stools bolted to the ground, but with a little bit more distance between them. The last three rows reminded me of old cinema seats – of way better quality than the horrible stools, but still not really comfortable and clearly installed before McDonald’s supersized the average Japanese from tiny to small. Bow chicka wow wow. This room was so cliché 70s porn it was tough to wrap my mind around it. The cheap pink plastic decoration was so horrible I felt a little bit embarrassed just looking at it, but I guess when it was dark and you focused on the stage it didn’t matter. Sadly it wasn’t completely dark in there. Just almost, with bright light coming in from a door leading outside.

I still didn’t like the location, but I continued exploring and taking photos. Before I headed upstairs (yes, this part of the building had a second floor) I checked the entrance area, but it just offered more tacky decoration, an upset vending machine and a huge list of phone numbers of local accommodations…

The second floor (with a sign “Men please keep out!”) was so vandalized and boring that I decided to not take photos there and just include it in the video tour, especially since we were running out of time anyway. I’m sure some fellow explorers would have loved to go through the personal belongings left behind for hours, but I’m getting tired of those moldy, smelly kitchens, bathrooms and tiny private apartments. The only really interesting room up there was almost completely dark and contained the controls for the lights and sound in the big strip stage room. Looking down almost made me expect some pig-cops – the whole setup really reminded me of the first episode of Duke Nukem 3D.
Oh, and in case you wonder: The big trophy you can see in the video was for a karaoke competition…

Leaving the abandoned Japanese Strip Club I felt a little bit like leaving *Nara Dreamland* – my head knew that I was exploring an amazing unique location, but my heart didn’t feel it. Nevertheless I hope you enjoyed this article and come back soon for more. Japan is an urbex paradise and there are dozens, maybe hundreds of locations to come…

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

Addendum 2012-11-27: I just posted an article about another abandoned Japanese sex museum: *Hokkaido House Of Hidden Treasures*

Posted in Abandoned, Asia, Chugoku, Haikyo, Japan, Okayama, Sex, Strip Club, Urbex, Video, Visited in 2012 | 14 Comments »

Kasuga Mine B

2012/09/03 by Florian / Abandoned Kansai

After leaving the first location of the Kasuga Mine (*Kasuga Mine A*) *Damon*, Andrew and I continued to the second site – much easier to find, much easier to enter, much more popular on the internet. Not so much amongst foreign urban explorers in Japan, the more so amongst Japanese. Nevertheless hardly anybody is willing or able to share some hard data about the Kasuga Mine (not to be confused with the still active Kasuga Gold Mine in Kyushu!). One of the things I found out is that the Kasuga Mine was a dolomite mine. Dolomite is used in the production of magnesium (as a source of magnesium oxide) and as a concrete aggregate – sometimes it’s used as an ornamental stone, but its physical properties (hardness, cleavage) doesn’t make it very popular for that use; it was one of the materials though the *reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant* was filled up with after the catastrophe, so 25 years ago it probably saved mankind…

When we arrived at the second mine in Kasuga the sun was already pretty low and time was running out. The area was dominated by a huge complex made of steel and wood in rather questionable condition – this place was definitely abandoned. While I was cautiously taking photos Damon was fearlessly all over the place. At one point he was climbing through a collapsed building, not knowing if there was solid ground under the debris or not. He made it to the other side alive and found the entrance to a very old-style mine, so I was like “Screw it!” and followed him. Luckily I brought my flashlight, because it was dark in there – darker than a black steer’s tookus on a moonless prairie night. And luckily I was wearing hiking boots, because the water pipes in there were leaking. I know for sure, because I was able to take a photo of one of the leaks. Without a tripod. Modern digital cameras are wonderful!

What we found was indeed a very old style mine shaft. Surprisingly spacious as I was able to walk upright for most of the time, nevertheless claustrophobic, especially the parts where the wooden support logs were rotting away and already collapsed. If you liked the video I took at the *abandoned Japanese Sex Museum* you will love the one I took at the Kasuga Mine. It felt like straight out of a survival horror game. And since the mine could have collapsed at any time I guess it really was like straight out of a survival horror game – we actually saw dead ends where it already happened. The absolute highlight was… Well, if you really want to know then watch the video, I won’t spoil it for you here. But what I saw made the Kasuga Mine a very memorable exploration! (That’s the reason why the videos are first this time – the photos will spoil the third video…)

Nevertheless I was very happy to leave this abandoned mine shaft. It just didn’t feel right. Back at the main building we didn’t want to overuse our luck and it was almost dark already anyway. And this is how the exploration of three abandoned mines on a single day ended – on a high note!

Posted in Abandoned, Chūbu, Gifu, Haikyo, Japan, Mine, Urbex, Video, Visited in 2011 | 4 Comments »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »