The Sports World Water Park in Izu is a well-hidden gem in the crown of Japan’s abandoned theme parks. Tucked away from the main theme park down a slim passage over-awed by rabid weeds, it gallops down the adjoining valley’s steep side in a furious rush, its brilliant blue umbilical water-slides snaking and inter-twining through the verdant green jungle canopy. Around its circumference the huge oval water-flume meanders bleached-white through pathways furred over with prickly weeds. Jutting up from its center and half-eaten by scraggly brush, the five-story speed-slide stands like a silent sentinel over the withered park, its roller-flumes speeding down only into clumps of thorny bush.
Cyborgs will have access to a much more massive range of sensory input data than we do. Just as we think nothing now of putting on our clothes to go outside, or getting in our cars to travel long distances, or turning on the TV to expand our direct input streams, they will think nothing of spreading their sense of touch out through the Internet, their sense of vision up through the infra-red or telescopically out into space, their sense of smell into degrees of precision down to the molecule, their sense of hearing spread throughout their whole home or network, and their sense of taste co-opted to sense wi-fi or gamma radiation.
Cyborg brains will be radically re-wired to accommodate these changes, hi-jacked by analog methods to create new sensory feeds through old routing mechanisms, as well as expanded with bolt-ons of whole new sensory apparati via re-programming, genetic manipulation, or straight up fresh motherboard implantation.
Cyborgization is the next step forward in the evolution of humankind.
Evolution as we have come to understand it, the blind watchmaker slotting together increasingly complex genetic structures at random, pushed ahead by unwitting external forces, the odds of survival, and success of procreation, is an outmoded and impossibly slow model for further advancement. Any change to the status quo will be responded to far more quickly by our technology than by our own genes.
Technology and the realm of ideas are the new playing field, where idea battles idea for favor, under the pressure of an Earth with finite resources and conflicting ideologies, a hard-wired human desire to acquire ever more and build ever higher, and a biology under constant assault from virulent micro-organisms. Only our technology, blindly and step by step just as with genetic evolution, driven by our ingenuity and genetic-borne big brains, can evolve fast enough to keep up with all these, as well as keep up with its own repercussions.
Kentucky- the land of Abraham Lincoln, Bluegrass music, Bourbon whiskey, the Kentucky Derby, some of the biggest losses in the Civil War, and all the family on my mother`s side. I`m British because my Dad is British and my mother ceded American citizenship when I was a kid- but I`ve always felt my soul was American: Kentucky American, and to a very small degree: Native American American.
I`m talking about this because I just got back from a 10-day vacation with my family in Kentucky. I haven`t been back to visit my grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins in Kentucky for around 7 years. The last time I was there I was just 21, just done with University and still pretty raw, passing through on my way to the summer camp I worked in close to Boston. The cousins were all still little kids, and I was still viewing everything through the lens of a kid myself.
Well, not this time. This time, the gloves were off, Kentucky! I was on the cultural and familial Straight Talk Express- getting to the real deal of my family and heritage in Colonel Sanders` Bluegrass State.
Japan’s Russian Village Theme Park sprawls empty and forlorn atop a small hill set back from the main road, shrouded by a thick raft of cedar trees that hide its embarassing failed extravangance from the world. Built 2002 and abandoned after just 6 months, the endeavour was ill-fated from the start: a theme park in the middle of nowhere with no rides.
Russian church in Japanese mountains.
Now its giant fake mammoths rest unseen in their dark and musty show hall, the vibrant blue onion-domes of its vaulting ‘Russian’ church slowly tarnish to white, and the shops once filled with Matroska dolls and Russian jewellry lie in vandalized ruin.
Fake mammoth bones in the park’s central attraction.
I went to this haikyo with 3 friends- Mike, Jason, and Scott, the largest group I’ve been with yet. We rented an X-trail and set off from Tokyo around mid-day, hoping vaguely we might make it to the Russian Village before nightfall. We came close, but as the twisting roads of our ‘short-cut’ round Niigata city sucked the light out of the sky, and the actual Village proved to be located one large block over from where our map had instructed us to look- we ended up entering in darkness.
Various biblical scenes in technicolor glory adorn the church’s gables.
The baby Jesus holds court in a pocket of Mary’s gown, rather like a baby kangaroo.
It was my third night haikyo, second for camping, but the first for the rest of the guys (though Mike did a non-camp night haikyo before). Entering in a boisterous group though is very different from entering solo- but still, some of the emptiness of the place sank into us- such that later on when cooped up in a pristine hotel room, no-one dared to step out of the door into the empty corridor outside.
Entering by night and camping over is by far the best way to experience a haikyo. Haikyo at night and by day are two different places- one of them filled with mystery and intrigue, rippling shadows, noises in the dark- you miss all the detail and nuance, but catch the grand strokes, and the place at its emptiest and bleakest. By day it’s a cheerier affair, noisier, you can clearly see all the doors and the details you missed before. It’s time for video and photos- most of the exploring is already done.
The Russian Village has two main areas, one around the grand onion-domed church at the top by the entrance, and the other at the bottom, connected by a long covered walkway, the courtyard of shops and restaurants ringed by several cultural attractions and animal pens, including the show hall of the fake mammoths.
Mapboard, peeling.
We started with the church interior- stumbling upon a huge harp box but no harp, a working accordion which Mike wheezed some notes out of, numerous bibles written in both Japanese and Russian, and a giant fake pipe organ. The walls were covered with religious artwork, lots of angels brandishing swords, men halo-ed by light, and Jesus himself set into a light parabola on the ceiling, plus a few stained glass windows with angels looking down on the pews benignly.
Crosses and ties like rigging on a ship.
Splattered with fallen plaster, faux-grandiose walk down the aisle.
Pony-tailed Jesus watching down.
Jesus in the sky-hole.
Feeding fishes to the 5,000.
After that we meandered into the very large hotel complex, following in the footsteps of vandals who’d torn down the chandelier, trashed the gift shop, and gone to a lot of work to break into the various rooms- not always successfully. Most of the rooms were in good condition despite this- except for the penthouse, which had been thoroughly torn up.
Somebody smashed the heck out of this lock. And still failed to open the door.
Next we took the long and spider-infested walkway to the shop square. There we found lots of splintered Matroska dolls in various crafts shops, a working piano which I played the eerie Terminator theme music on in a ghoulash restaurant, a micro-brewery emptied of all vats and tubes, and a shop that once sold diamond rings- I suppose for use in the functioning church.
Overgrown car park.
Model castle in a broken shopfront selling candy-canes and Matroska dolls.
Around that time it started to rain, and we all took up various rain-proofing paraphernalia- I used a box, others used Russian Village branded plastic bags. We studied the map- searching for the mammoth show-room. We had to rustle through chest-high weeds to find it, but once in it was really quite impressive, a high-ceilinged black-painted room with two giant mammoths, in front only a skeleton, in back a life-like rendering with matted brown hair. Of course the bones were fake, but the overall effect was impressive.
Toy mammoth on wheels. Of course I rode it, see in the video.
After the mammoth we were finished, and headed back to the hotel to pick a room to stay overnight in. There was a lot of debate about the cleanliness of the beds, and some talk even of putting up tents inside to avoid breathing the dust- but in the end we all bedded down on the hotels mattresses and sheets anyway. I had a wonderful sleep, unlike some of the others who barely slept- perhaps the atmosphere was a little too oppressive to sleep easily.
Executive suite. We didn’t sleep in here.
Bed-legs smashed into the wall like darts.
The next day dawned grey and dreary, with a fine drizzle of rain. We mostly split up and went our separate ways, documenting the place in our own style. I spent a lot of time around the church- I definitely admire it’s architecture, the sham art, the multiple cupolas. Scott called it ‘the Tetris building’ after a similar building in the game.
After that I tried my hand at interacting constructively with the ruins, for example by heaping chairs in the function room, gathering trash cans in an odd place, righting a giant owl on a perch, riding a toy mammoth, and setting up still-life mannequins in various poses round the lower half of the park.
Stacking chairs for kicks.
Mannequins strolled around the park like zombies.
Posing with the other grand old men of the park.
Gossiping in the walkway.
Arranged trash cans. I wanted to make a Stonehenge arch, but the darn things were too heavy to lift. See that failure in the video.
After I shot the mammoth for the second time, I was about haikyo-ed out. Haikyo fatigue has set in before- when exploring the Nichitsu Mining Town in Saitama. We were just going in and out of many apartments in a long row- with no joy of discovery anymore, mechanically looking in them all as if it were a repetitive job. When you get to that stage and the fun has drained away, it’s time to leave- and we did, with the added excitement of Mike seeing some kind of worker stalking the ruins with a measuring tape. We high-tailed it out of there and hit the road.
We had hoped to make it to another haikyo in Tochigi before the day was out, but it was already 2pm, we were hungry, and it seemed like wishful thinking to hope to arrive at a new place at least 100km away with enough daylight left to do it justice. So we called it a day, and headed back to Tokyo.
UPDATE
4 years later, in 2012, I revisited the Russian Village, to see how it had fared in that time. There had been a lot of damage. If you’re interested in how the Village changed, see that post here.
Shimoda has some of the most beautiful and pristine yellow-sand blue-ocean beaches in all of Japan. Commodore Perry certainly picked a choice spot to roll up at in his black ships- further up the coast other trade envoys were met by steel-toting Samurai’s stood on the grey-sand grey-ocean cock-roach infested trash-havens of Enoshima and Kamakura. Not for Perry though, and not in Shimoda. Shirahama, Tatadohama, and Ohama beaches are gorgeous, sun-kissed, and every time I’ve visited them- about 50% empty.
Deep within the solid rock of the Negishi Plateau in Yokohama, spreading beneath the old race-course Grandstand and Yokosuka Naval Base, lies a twisting warren of hidden World War 2-era caverns. Once filled with ancient munitions, bustling troops, and rooms full of military dossiers, they now rest in lonely silence, unexplored for up to 20 years, their secrets stopped up behind entrances back-filled with avalanche scree and trash, overgrown by thick vines in loamy earth, and walled off with sheets of blast-concrete.
“There was a village in the mountains at the top of the world that was always shrouded in mist. Its name was Ballahee, and in it lived a small community of people, good people, who tended to their crops on the mountainsides, and looked after their sheep and their hardy goats. The villagers had many problems, such as the cold winters and the wolves in the scrub-woods, but by far their biggest problem was the mist.
The mist had always been there, and the villagers knew there was nothing they could do to stop it. They could barely see each other out on the street, but that was normal, and they accepted it. They could barely see the earth to pull out their crops, turnips and potatoes. The school-children could scarcely see the school-teachers jottings on the blackboard in the school, and lovers could barely see their own names they had etched into the old oak tree behind the Jansen’s stead. But that was normal, and they accepted it. Things had always been like this in Ballahee. The villagers had tried everything, but nothing did any good, and they all thought the mist would always remain. That is, until the Mistman came. 2Read More
Snake Cat lives in the city’s gutters and drain-pipes, crawling along on his side, hunting Snark and weevils, distending his jaw to swallow them whole. He is lithe and lissome like freshly steamed yew, he can contort into the shape of the letter ‘O’ or even the letter ‘A’. His tail is prehensile like a monkey’s and he uses it to slide down power-lines and into the homes of unsuspecting Wombles- whom he also eats.
This was a rare day-time sighting of Snake Cat. Crawl, Snake Cat, crawl!
You’re in space. The trip up took 8 hours- most of which involved you sitting sideways strapped into a second-hand shuttle waiting for air traffic control to give you the all-clear, with no option to get up and go the bathroom (yep, adult diaper). Now you’re on board a creaking old Russian hybrid rust-bucket where everything stinks of Ozone, you’re losing bone mass on a constant and permanent basis, the weather outside sucks, you can’t relax for a second without strapping yourself to a wall because your limbs float off randomly in zero-G, you can’t go to the bathroom without having to attach undignified hoses to your body, and you’re sharing the cramped and claustrophobic quarters with a bunch of super-earnest elitist prats.
The least you could ask for is a bit of honest-to-goodness, home-made cooking just like Momma used to make. Well, you won’t get that, but if you are a Japanese citizen you are entitled to freeze-dried comfort food mass-produced by machines in high-density chunks. Flavors so delicious as Shrimp Gratin, Kimchi, Ramen Noodles, Yakitori, with Ice Cream to top it off.
