The old curiosity shop in Takadanobaba has been a mystery to me for a long time. I first spotted it passively years ago, before I lived near here, most likely on a trip to the Blue Parrot second-hand book store. It’s built in red-brick, or at least the facade is, and instantly stands out when surrounded by a street lined with featureless plaster-cement buildings. It is obviously no longer in use, with papered -up windows, an overgrown window-box, and vines creeping down the sheet metal siding. Peeking inside through the veiled glass doors reveals dim shapes, one that looks like …
The abandoned resort of Saurabol on Jeju island
Jeju island at the southern tip of South Korea is (apparently) famous for three things- wind, rocks, and beautiful women. I didn’t see many of the latter, but can attest to both of the former, plus a fourth- haikyo resort hotels. Without really going out of our way on a recent holiday there, SY and I stumbled across four abandoned resorts, two of them pretty grand. All of them had been deserted mid-way through construction, leaving only the bones of their underlying structure. The Saurabol central entrance.
15 Abandoned Haikyo Phones
Even the seasoned haikyoist is wary of haikyo phones- they are one of the myriad unseen dangers of haikyo. Alongside other well-known hazards such as poisonous mushrooms (don`t eat them!), yakuza packing hand-guns (don`t antagonize them!), and saprophytic organisms clouding parasitcally around dead bodies (don`t disturb them!), abandoned phones have the power to kill. They are Frankenstein`s monsters that can rumble to life (dialling tones!) at the most unexpected of times. Imagine walking into a morgue, starting an autopsy on a cadaver, then having that body leap up and start strangling you. *shudders* A dead phone should stay dead. 1 …
The Prada store that got left behind
In the Texas desert near the little town of Marfa, on a stretch of Highway known as the loneliest road in America, sits the Prada store that got left behind. No attendants bustle behind its chic white counters, though it’s fully stocked with veblen bags and shoes. The automatic doors don`t open and no one will validate your parking, but the lights do come on at night, making its glowing glass frontage the only illumination for miles around. Photo by Jonathon Percy.
Haikyo Deflation Spiral
If you`re into haikyo, you`ll probably already know about Haikyo Deflation Spiral. If you don`t, let me introduce you. It`s one of the top sites on the web for Japanese ruins. Compared to all the other Japan ruins sites (twodogs, ruins-site, etc..) it`s very easy to navigate, with very simple posts for each location visited. The site runner is Hiroyuki Tsuzuki , he`s a visual arts designer around the same age as me- 30. I don`t think he has a book out, but since he`s stopped updating his website I guess he`s working on material for one. He also has …
Tama Lake Ruins in Black and White
The Ruins on Tama Lake changed little since the last time I came to visit. Perhaps the wooden huts of the Red Blossom restaurant have canted a little further towards collapse, and the walls of the Akasaka love hotel were holed and splintered a little more. A new fence has gone up, with warnings of CCTV cameras watching 24/7. Wires dangle from the mock cameras, now only effective as scarecrows to the masses. Red Blossom huts slide down the hillside in slow motion.
The aftermath of Oradour’s War
Oradour-sur-Glane is a village in west-central France. The original village was destroyed on 10 June 1944, when 642 of its inhabitants, including women and children, were massacred by a German Waffen-SS company. A new village was built after the war on a nearby site and the original has been maintained as a memorial. Photo by Ramos Andrade.
Stonehenge’s little brother: Carhenge
Carhenge is a replica of the 4,500 year old Stonehenge ruin in England. It was built by Jim Reinders in Nebraska, USA, using 38 vintage automobiles spray-painted gray and posed after the original sarsens, lintels, and altar stones of Stonehenge. Now the work is surrounded by a ring of ‘portal’ cars, dinosaurs, and giant fish, spray-painted in gaudy colors and forming a wider ‘Car Art Reserve’. Altar ‘stone’. Photo by Jeremy Burgin. Carhenge consists of 38 automobiles arranged in a circle measuring about 29 metres in diameter. Some are held upright in pits 1.5 metres deep, trunk end down, and arches have …
Aral: the sea that vanished overnight
The Aral Sea was once one of the four largest lakes in the world, situated between Kazakhstan in the north and Uzbekistan in the south. In the 1960’s the Soviet Union redirected its tributary rivers into irrigation projects, and as a result by 2007 it had shrunk to 10% of its original size. Once prosperous fishing towns like Muynak were left stranded miles from the retreating waters, their boats high and dry on the salt-encrusted desert sand. Photo by Urban Explorer.
Dunes envelop the Namibian toytown of Kolmanskop
One day a giant went to play in the Namibian desert. He made a toytown village out of bits of things he found lying around; the husks of scorpion shells, desiccated bones, sand-sifted diamonds, and brightly colored plaster. He lined up his toytown houses in neat little rows, serviced them with a tinker rail-line, then sat back and sighed in contentment. The next day he walked away and left the toytown to the sands. Kolmanskop is a ghost town in the deserts of Namibia, built by the DeBeers mining company in 1908, abandoned in 1956 after diamond prices crashed. The …