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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.

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The 1937 Chevy at Bodie ghost town

Bodie is a ghost town east of the Sierra Nevada mountain range in Mono County, California, United States, about 75 miles southeast of Lake Tahoe. It has been administered by California State Parks since becoming a state historic park in 1962, and receives about 200,000 visitors yearly.

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The ash-flooded town of Chantai

On my Artificial Owl post last week I wondered aloud if I might try my hand at re-posting photos of ruins sites from around the world.  Well, I spent the week on and off scouring for something interesting, that I hadn’t seen before, that wasn’t already so exposed that everybody knows what it is. It’s actually quite a hard thing to do- involving lots of time spent scrolling through image lists generated by key word searches, looking for something that stands out and is ruined.

Hmm, well. Here I present to you:

The ash-flooded town of Chantai, in Chile.

I’m still not sure if it’ll become a regular feature of this site, so this post is basically a test balloon.

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Gunkanjima Opens

Gunkanjima opens to the public! The famed ‘Battleship Island’, properly Hashima island- formerly a haikyo Holy Grail, has now been opened to tourists to ‘explore’ along a specially built walkway. The cost of the trip is 4,000yen, including the ferry ride out to the dilapidated island. Tourists have up to one hour (weather permitting) to wander the walkway before they have to re-board the ferry and leave.

This is great in some ways- the island will be preserved, vandals will be stopped from gaining access as security will be doubtless beefed up. But for the same reason, any proper exploration of the island will now be virtually impossible. It’s a live site again.

UER has a ton of photos and text about this place- including many more photos by Kuroneko, amongst others. The following text by

‘As days passed on the island, my impression of it began to change greatly. The innumerable articles left behind, all shrouded in dust, rusted,to me at first seemed merely drifting toward death. Yet, from one point in time, they started to look vivid, and beautiful. I thought perhaps the island, while appearing to fall deep asleep, had gradually commenced to awaken, the day it was deserted.’

Video from Dotokou, a man who grew up on the island, and revisits before it was opened to the public. Haunting. English subtitles.

Brian Burke-Gaffney writes a great article on Gunkanjima.

The Gunkanjima ferry info can be accessed from this site.

Thanks to Miki for tipping me off on this.

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. All of it now sinking, as the floor-boards bow under the weight of 30 years of absence and neglect.

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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.

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