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.
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.
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.
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.
The dead boar of Yamanaka lake
The Yamanakako Spa Resort Hotel in Yamanashi prefecture very nearly didn’t make the cut to appear on this site, as I came close to just walking on by. It was only an hour or so from dusk, and I’d already spent hours exploring and shooting the main Resort Hotel I’d come out for. From the outside it was an unremarkable complex, a simple red brick structure set off from the road on a slight hill. The first building in the complex was bland on the inside, but the second had more to offer; a spacious main function space spread with beautifully crinkled red floor tiles, cocooned by a curved glass-wall exterior, dotted with small private onsen, and guarded by the dead and dessicated corpse of a bristly wild pig.
The hotel on Yamanaka lake they never finished
The Yamanakako Resort Hotel at the foot of Mt. Fuji is another Bubble-era dead-end, a half-built extravagance that freezes in time the moment the crash occurred. Its rooms lie fallow and bare, uncarpeted and unpainted, with no furnishings but for dusty bath-tubs still in their vinyl casts, yet to be plumbed into the pipe-stalks jutting from the rough cement floors. Pyramidal heaps of wall-paper slowly mildew in the wind-swept hallways, alongside racks of wooden drywall frames with workers’ sawhorses standing ready for use, all of it written off and forgotten about when the economy collapsed.
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