• Home
• About
• Dark Fiction
• Haikyo Photography
• Ruins Gallery
• Strange Japan

Top 5 Japanese Ghost Towns

Common wisdom about Japan says it`s a tiny island with a serious premium on space, leading to real estate prices in the cities higher even than the most exclusive blocks of Manhattan. The thought that there might be whole abandoned towns on this island seems a paradox- how could a country with so little space abandon anything?

Well, they do.

Ghost Towns are the ultimate haikyo (ruins exploration) experience. If you long to be Indiana Jones, this is where you need to go. This is where the mystery is. In the doctor’s office the scalpels are laid out for surgery. Battered wooden apartments are still filled with the weathered remnants of their old occupants. Doors hang open, plates sit with long-rotten food, calendars are still marked for some future date, left as they were.

Most ghost towns in Japan are built around mines, like abandoned gold rush towns in the American West. When the mine seams gave out the jobs went away and the people left. Soon, the place was abandoned.

Let`s take a look at 5 of Japan`s best.

Read more

Ruined Toyota on Tamako

The last time I went to the Akasaka Love Hotel on Lake Tama was November 2008. Winter was just setting in and had not yet sloughed away the summer`s ripe vegetation, meaning that this gorgeous neglected Toyota was mostly buried in foliage.

I took a few shots of it scraggled with greenery but they didn`t stand out. Now winter reveals its pale bones, most of them broken backwards and jiggling loosely on rusted hinges.

A Toyota.

Read more

10 Abandoned Vehicles

The haikyoist must be ready to use any means of conveyance at his or her disposal. If that means hot-wiring an old mammoth or jerry-rigging an escalator to run like a hamster-wheel, so be it. It`s just another part of the infamous haikyoist`s creed – take only photos, leave only footprints, don`t touch the fire extinguishers, and ride it if you can.

Russian Village theme park.

Read more

5 Stories in Ruins

Ruins feature prominently in my fiction, and continue to do so even though I haven`t posted any short stories here for a long time. I`m currently working on a trilogy set in my fantasy universe of Jabbler`s Mons, about halfway through the second book and revising the first. Since I`ve posted no fiction for a long time, I thought I`d reintroduce a few pieces through the lens of ruins. Here are 5 of my short stories, all about ruins.

Click through on any of them to read the full thing.

Sir Clowdishley and the Sea

Sir Clowdishley once explored the oceans, astronomer to the King, until his family died in the waves. Now he wanders the coasts of England in the ruins of his own once-glory.

I love the idea of a guy hell-bent on revenge on an inanimate object. There`s something beautifully self-deceptive about it, but also hopeful. Can he force the sea to relent?

Read more

The Guardian reviews this site

About an hour ago the Guardian newspaper put a review of this site online. It was written by Johnny Dee in the `This week`s internet previews` section, and was very positive. As you can imagine, I`m very surprised and pleased at this development. The Guardian!

It`s a short review, and in it he talks mostly about the haikyo galleries, but he also mentions my fiction, reviews, and highlights the nuclear blast craters article. Click the paper to go to the review.

The ruins of LOST

The TV show LOST is all about ruins.  The island itself is a living museum, a place where the relics of millennia-old statues rest side by side with downed aircraft and underground research stations, all of them abandoned fossils of our cultural evolution.

A huge part of the show`s appeal has been the Indiana Jones-esque exploration of these ruins. It`s one of the reasons I`m such a big LOST fan. Click through to relive the adventure.

Read more

« Previous Page — Next Page »