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

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.

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.

Read more

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

Next Page »