Japan’s Jungle Park is an immense abandoned green house, an indoor botanical garden sheltering nearly 10,000 square meters worth of sweltering tropical habitat. It was built in 1969, and its peak of operation came in 1973 when it received 750,000 visitors per year. By 2003 over 10 million people had passed through its vast and humid acreage, but its facilities were showing their age and fewer and fewer people were coming each year. It was closed in the fall of 2003, and has lain fallow there like a giant white tent for the past seven years. Jungle Park`s main entrance.
Ruin of the White Root Mine
The White Root mine is old, so old that only the faintest outlines of its bones remain. Squint hard and you might see fragments of its ribcage scattered over the hillside, parts of a cracked skull just visible through the topsoil. Once it must have been huge, swathing up and down the valley and pumping out smoke, now there’s just a single slurry run and a few walls left. I went there ages ago, on the same road trip that took me to the Gunma Ski Lift, Hume Cement Factory, and back to the Asama Volcano Museum. Some kind of …
Japan’s dying Ceramic Land theme park
During Japan’s real estate Bubble in the 1980’s, theme parks were the investment to make. They couldn’t fail. Sink millions into expensive construction, land, and man-power, and ride the surging economy to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. All those decades of post-war militaristic industrialism had finally paid off, and people were finally taking more leisure time and traveling further afield to enjoy it- you couldn’t go wrong with a theme park. Except of course, you could. The Bubble burst like an over-ripe peach and all the wacky ideas that before had seemed so bright- The …
The hotel one man dug out of solid rock #2 interior
Takahashi Minekichi was a rural Japanese strawberry farmer with a vision. For 21 years he carved the beginnings of a grand hotel into the solid rock wall of a cliff face on his land, digging out the contours only he could see. He did it all alone, using only a chisel, until the day he died in 1925. It was never completed, and no rooms beyond the lobby and kitchen/shrine were ever dug. No-one ever stayed there, but still it remains to this day, thoroughly fenced off and out of bounds. Inside the Gan Kutsu cliff face hotel, grand staircase.
Baba’s abandoned curiosity shop
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 …
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.
Weekender Interview and Cover
A few months back Elisabeth Lambert of the Tokyo Weekender (one of several free English magazines available in Tokyo) got in touch with me about haikyo. She was doing research for an article, and we went back and forth with a few sets of interview questions. It’s always interesting for me to talk about haikyo, especially if the person ‘gets it’- compared to people who (and I understand this view too) think ‘why would you want to go to dirty old buildings full of trash’? The magazine came out this week, and it turns out the haikyo piece is the …