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Peaceful Haikyo of a Motor Lodge

I don’t know anything about this haikyo- no history, no past claims to glory or modern haunting. Like the Sun Hills Hotel Car Park before it it’s just a place with some beautiful shapes, light, and decay. Nobody goes there, though access is easy. Nothing is there, so there is very little evidence of vandalism, besides the usual broken windows and occasional weak bit of graffiti. For all that, I really liked the place. The light was tremendous, the architecture and lines of the structure very strong, intriguing. The main hub was a circular tower, with spiraling staircases, floor-to-ceiling windows letting in a flood of light, and a sea-shell roof-top that spun up like a winding road to the apex.

Winding stairs in the shell-like motor lodge.

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Skeletal hotels on the Sinai Peninsula

The Middle East was the cradle of civilization, once lush and verdant lands ravaged by over-farming, over-population, and ensuing desertification. Modern cities like Dubai in the UAE seek to prolong their existence via their last resource, oil, building vast and bizarre structures in the water and on land in hopes of bringing in business people like tourists to a theme park. It may work. If it doesn’t, this is what it will look like.

Cactus Hotel

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Ruined Shimoda Grand

The Shimoda Grand looms like a listing battleship on a swell of green, doomed to eventually sink without trace, swallowed up by the knotty growth of years.

This was the third ruin on the first day of our road trip into Izu. Shimoda is famous for its gorgeous (imported) white sand beaches, and for being the lookout point where Colonel Perry was first seen chuffing towards Tokyo harbor in his black iron-clad steam ships. In the summer you can’t move on the beaches for all the people cramming their bodies onto a patch of white sand, filling up the hotels, and packing out the restaurants. In the off-season though the place is a ghost town, spelling the death knell for numerous failed hotels (I saw at least another two just by the roadside) that couldn’t take the long hibernation.

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Okawa Grand Hotel Haikyo, Izu

The Okawa Grand Hotel in Izu was remarkable for the perfectly clean, skimmed and filtered swimming pool set between its two tropically ruined buildings. Shut down for at least twenty years but still plastered with signs to rent or sell, the owners clearly still have high hopes for it. In every room you can hear the lapping of the sea on the rocky beach. As we left, a gang of kids moved in to use the pool.

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Long-gone memories of the BE lab

The BE labs haikyo in Shizuoka is mis-representing itself somewhat by posing as a lab; at best it was a spa-resort for people who worked at a lab, somewhere far off and long ago. It sits in the crook of some distinctly un-Japanese rolling hills, looking rather like a bunker with its zig-zag concrete front-eave and fence-wires on the flat-slab roof.

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The ruined conference center built into a cliff- Yamamoto

The Yamamoto Grand Center is a gracefully aging architectural foible, tucked away in a quiet corner of Tochigi prefecture on a die-cut volcanic crag. Warm spring winds blow confetti cherry blossoms through its many gaping windows, fluttering with old receipts and leaflets in zephyrs around its stacked and musty furniture. In the Grand Hall, weeds grow up in molding grass tatami mats. Once a ribald conference and function space, its long abandonment has lent a solemn gravitas it could not have had in life.

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