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

The beautiful ruined tubes of Sports World

Sports World is probably my favourite haikyo in Japan. In an upcoming top ten list of ruins in East Japan I’m putting together, it will more than likely be number 1. It’s just so awesome. It’s massive, 20 years abandoned but relatively intact, and set in a really beautiful forested mountain area. There are creepy screaming monkeys/birds at night, models on fashion shoots by day, and all manner of ways to entertain oneself clambering, clowning, and investigating the rest of the time.

Blue tubes.

Read more

The lonely ore-cart of Seigoshi Mine

Seigoshi mine hides its secrets well. Fronted by a live builder’s yard, shielded by a fence with a live antenna inside, overgrown, ramshackle, and falling down- if you can plough through all of that you get to the good stuff- lonely mine carts, ancient bottles of whiskey, LOST-like hatches complete with beeping machinery, and store rooms filled with boxes of TNT.

Waiting.

Read more

The forgotten classrooms of Okawa seminar house

We took the coast route around the hill, trying to find a road that would lead us to the Seminar House Paul had seen from the train. At the top we rolled around wealthy summer homes for 20 or so minutes, peering over the edge, constantly wondering if we were too high, too low, too far round. We got out to walk.

“Look, it’s a deer.”

“Hey, deer!”

The deer ran away.

“Why’d you scare it away like that?”

“I was just saying hello.”

much better

Read more

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.

Read more

Small Pox Isolation Ward Haikyo

Small Pox was once an incurable killer, claiming around 400 million deaths in the first half of the 20th century before its eradication.  The people who contracted it were likely to die, and had to be removed from the general population lest they spread the infection to others. The Small Pox Isolation Ward Haikyo set into a then-remote Izu cliff-side was one such place they’d be banished to, to endure the agonies of their disease while lying on a straw mattress in a wooden shack, looking out to the sea and waiting to die.

Read more

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.

Read more

Next Page »