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Diggnation!

The guys on diggnation from Revision 3 covered my asylum top 10 ghost town article on their most recent show. This is awesome. I don`t customarily watch the show- I`ve got Scott to thank for the notification- but am well aware of digg, and of the comings and goings of co-host Kevin Rose thanks to his appearances on This Week in Tech. It`s fantastic to have him reading and liking my article and photos- even if he does garble one sentence from the text.

Thanks to the guys on diggnation for choosing this article to cover, and thanks to everyone on digg (even the ones who dissed the HDR, especially baddbrainz for submitting) for digging and commenting.

Ruin of a Japanese WWII Shipyard

The Kawaminami shipyard was opened in 1936 and went bankrupt in 1955. It had four huge bays and two large factory buildings. Through the war years it served as both a munitions factory, a drydock for construction of cargo ships, escort ships, and kaitens, and possibly also as a Prisoner of  War (POW) slave labor camp.  By some accounts up to 4000 POWs were forced to work here during wartime.

The main factory hall.

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Ruins of the Statue of Liberty

The Statue of Liberty is an icon, a beacon-fire at America`s shore calling out to all and sundry- `come on in, there`s plenty of room!` To destroy her is to denounce the very idea of America, to throw that generosity of spirit back in her face and cry out `who needs you?`

Aliens have done this a few times. Meteors twice. Global warming and global sanding have been involved also. In disaster movies the destruction of Lady Liberty has become something of a cliche, but that doesn`t stop it from being awesome.

Read on for the gallery. Read more

Top 10 Haikyo

Common wisdom says Japan is a tiny island nation crammed from shore to shore with people living one on top of the other. Every bit of spare space is used to build Prius factories and grow rice.

In actuality, though, there are far more dark spots on the map than you’d imagine. The general view that every square inch of land is worth a bazillion dollars is just not true. There are gaps in the façade that whole towns have fallen into, along with bizarre abandoned theme parks, ruined U.S. Air Force bases, and the tawdry remnants of pay-by-the-hour love hotels.

These places are known as haikyo, the Japanese word for ruins — and Japan has plenty of them.

Based on over six years of actively exploring these haikyo, I’ve put together a list of the 10 most beautiful, most historic and most interesting. Read on to see these amazing forgotten gems, and click on the images to see more.

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600 Diggs and site news

My article on Asylum has reached 600 Diggs, and I`m really pleased. The Digg page got a lot of comments, largely it seems about how bad the HDR is. Looking back on those shots, I can see better what people are talking about now. Part of it is a change of monitor- the old one didn`t show the colors so vividly, so they didn`t look so over-saturated. The new one (just using my macbook screen) shows it better.

The Asylum article has sent about 10,000 people to this site so far. That`s pretty amazing. It blows the roof off my monthly page views, taking it from around 50,000 a month to something like 70 or 80,000. About half of those people only stayed for 1 page and less than 10 seconds, but the other half stayed longer so no worries.

In other site news- I`ve changed the look of the site some, and been experimenting with ad-types. I`d like to make a little money from this page, but am realistic about that. It`s a niche thing to cover, and there`s no obvious product to sell. So I`m adding a Paypal donate button (just watched the movie Julie/Julia last night) and we`ll see if that does anything. If you`d like to make a donation, it will be much appreciated.

Ah, final news, am `resurrecting` my old Strange Japan content. At the moment only the Snacks/Drinks page is up, but the others will be returned soon.

I`d love to hear your thoughts on any of the above.

Asylum Haikyo Article

The US men`s magazine Asylum is currently running an article introducing haikyo to their readers, written by me. It’s a top 10 of all the best `ghost towns` in Japan, and is the first of what could be several articles on Japan`s ruins on that site.

Asylum is a popular online magazine catering to culture-savvy young men. They generally run articles about weird stuff and hot laydeez. Apparently they surpass Playboy.com, Maxim.com and many others, with 31 million page-views by around 2 million readers per month. Wow.

This article has been in the pipeline for about 4 months, waiting for its air date. I`m excited its finally live, and want to welcome anyone coming from there to check out this site.

It`s easy enough to navigate- all the ruins can be found in the ruins galleries. If you`re interested in my fiction, it`s in the library. If you like what you find, why not subscribe by RSS or email for updates in the future? Thanks.

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