The remnants of the Sun Hills Hotel in Kanagawa lay hunkered down and spartan on the banks of Sagamiko lake, the blank concrete foundation of a proud edifice that never once opened to the public, hosting only the village’s truanting kids and vandals before it was unceremoniously torn down. Now just its 2-story underground car park remains, haunted by chirping crickets and families of hikers on sight-seeing breaks. Sun Hills car park.
Behemothic hotel, abandoned like a beached whale
The Shin Shu Kanko Hotel in Nagano is a leviathan beast, 3 whale-sized buildings interlinked by encircling roads, interior corridors, underground passages and a long bridging escalator. The largest of the 3 is seven stories high with easily 100 rooms along its spine, with huge onsen, function rooms, izakaya and a hall. The smaller two add about another 50 rooms each, clutching up to the hill in back and spread like wings around the main complex. All of it empty, trashed, and creaking in the wind. Shin Shu Kanko looking up.
What remains of Matsumoto Castle
Matsumoto Castle in Nagano is one of the few remaining original castles in Japan. A fort was first built at the site in 1504, then in 1550 the Takeda clan under big boss Tokugawa Ieyasu built it up further, with the Norimasa clan taking over stewardship from 1590, extensively reinforcing and adding to the structure. That makes it around 500 years old, no doubt one of the oldest buildings in Japan. It’s a traditional wooden structure of several levels, with the pagoda-like structure common in traditional Japanese buildings. It is nick-named “Crow Castle” for it’s black walls and spreading wings. …
Memories of Nichitsu 4. The Dr.’s brain in a jar
Nichitsu is a tiny little village huddled in a chilly mountain pass, far from the nearest population center. Come an emergency the Doctor’s office would have been the only ER, so its few rooms were crammed full of equipment, now forgotten and lying in shadow: rusted iron operating tables, toppled X-ray machinery, birthing stirrups lying in puddles of water and moss, leather dentistry chairs ripped and spewing foam, ancient defibrillators on window-sills, walls lined with shelves stocked with bottles of nondescript pills and musty tinctures, documents sheafed and scattered everywhere, surgical clamps in heaps and organs floating in formaldehyde jars. …
Nichitsu 3. A fire truck in the ghost town
Nichitsu Ghost Town stretches for around a kilometer, from the semi-functioning mine shacks at the mouth of the last tunnel, up past the Junior High School, the heavily dilapidated wooden apartments, and buildings stacked off the steep hillside on concrete supports, round a hill of white lime-chips, past the Doctor`s office hidden somewhere in the thicket of buildings, up to the Lower School, dorm, and warren of walkways. Dis-sheveled buildings.
Nichitsu 2. Elementary school in a Ghost Town
At the dead-end of a blast-hewn road snaking up through the mountains north of Tokyo, imprisoned by sheer moss-rocked walls looming overhead like rotting Gothic colonnades, the Nichitsu mine ghost town lies in wait, wreathed in a low mist and perennially dusk-lit by the overhanging crags. It hums with a crippling weight of nostalgia, of enfolded memories playing out again and again in its boarded up buildings, of invisible ghosts standing guard at the mine entrance, looking out of cracked windows, walking their habitual paths to and from and back again.
Japan’s ropeway that died
Scrunched up behind thickets of winter-boned brush off the banks of a man-made lake, the last remaining carriage of the Okutama Ropeway hangs slack in its berthing perch. Once a completely false folly, a gaudy ride of a few minutes across a narrow artificial lake, taking in the view of TNT-blasted canyon walls, unnecessary ringing roads, the bridge beside it enforcing its redundancy, it is now consigned to be the most natural thing there, with clotted brown leaves as its only passengers, vines clinging to the station walls the only attendants.
Kaze no To and Umi Hotaru, Tokyo Bay
From the 25th floor lobby of the Dentsu HQ in Shiodome there’s an awesome view across Tokyo Bay, taking in Hamarikyu gardens, Odaiba, the Rainbow Bridge, and in the distance, fogged by pollution and heat distortion- a weird-looking dome-shaped structure out in the middle of nowhere. Weird dome, at 200mm zoom from the edge of Odaiba.
The Grand-daddy of all Love Hotels
The Hotel Royal haikyo is the grand-daddy of all love hotels, streaking 7 empty stories up into the big blue sky, a giant vermillion flag on the lakeshore calling out to all and sundry in a mega-watt alto- ‘Need some discreet time alone with your loved one? Come on down!’
The Life and Death of the Sofitel Hotel
The Sofitel Hotel once stood on the Ueno park skyline like a bizarrely massive chest of drawers, at once a paean to modern design aesthetics and traditional Shinto values. It was demolished in December 2006 after only 12 years of offering 83 4-star rooms in central Tokyo, leaving a weirdly-shaped gap on the city-scape viewed from Shinobazu pond. Like the cherry blossoms that frame so many shots of the Sofitel, it was only a temporary beauty, one that serves to remind us of the short time we`re here, and how any one of us can be called away at any …