Caterpillar Man @ Shelter of Daylight!

Mike Grist Books, Stories 4 Comments

shelter1One of my stories, Caterpillar Man, has found its way into print. I don’t really know how this happened. I don’t recall the magazine editor checking in with me about the story, though I do recall them asking me how I wanted to be paid. Hey cool, I thought, and who are you? Back from my UK holiday I found my contributor’s copy waiting in the post-box- my story is the last in it. The magazine is a biannual anthology, I think I submitted the story to a sister publication about a year ago.

You can buy it here.

Or you can read the story on my site here.

Is it worth buying the magazine? Well, it’s not quite the art-filled effort that Something Wicked was; rather it’s a straight-forward binding of 10 or so stories, with a few poems and one or two pieces of art. I read a few of the other stories in it and I enjoyed them. At only $9 it’s pretty good value- but I won’t make a sales pitch as I don’t see any kind of commission.

All this print action recently has whetted my appetite for more. It’s a very different proposition to have something tangible in your hands with your name on, a product, compared to publication online. We’ll see if I can’t write some things, and submit them.

The Pearl love hotel, overgrown with brambles

Mike Grist Haikyo, Sex Industry, Tochigi 10 Comments

The Pearl Love Hotel Haikyo in Tochigi is a wreck in camouflage, deeply nested underneath a blanket of scraggy brown vines. Rooms lie in embers, grown through with ferns; once-bohemian beds, chaise longues and chandeliers lie scrapped, dropped, and despoiled with the nests of birds, spiders, and the homeless. The grand two-story executive suite still maintains some of its sordid gravitas, its sultry red round-bedded apex room as faux-regal as ever, now overlooking a graveyard of spent passion inveigled by nature’s rapacious tendrils.

pearl-hotel7005

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The Fix reviews Freemantle Mons

Mike Grist Uncategorized 1 Comment

The Fix– Online literature review site The Fix recently ran a review of Something Wicked- the first print magazine one of my stories has appeared in. The reviewer said this about the story:

‘In Freemantle Mons The Leviathan Smile by Michael John Grist, an old clock stops, and the people for whom it is a fixture are surprised to discover that the sun fails to rise and time fails to move forward without it. In the best tale of this issue, Freemantle Mons must discover why the sun refuses to rise and what it means not just for the city, but also for him.

That’s a great review. You can order copies of the print magazine here.

The dead boar of Yamanaka lake

Mike Grist Haikyo, Hotels / Resorts, Yamanashi 6 Comments

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.

spa-resort-7003

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Leanna Drew the Moon

Mike Grist Stories, Surreal 2 Comments

Leanna knew she was a special little girl, because the moon spoke to her. She knew that it shouldn’t, and that she shouldn’t listen, but none of that stopped it from happening. She drew pictures at school of her talking to a big moon face, and the moon saying things like “try eating those soap suds, Leanna,” or “that dog wants a bite of plasticine, go on,” and in the pictures she would go ahead and do it. The moon, after all, was her friend.

But it wasn’t always so nice.

She was 5 when it told her to kill her little brother. Her little brother was 6 months old. He lay in a cot and gurgled all day, while her parents fussed over him like he was a box of chocolates or something.

evilmoon1

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Gunkanjima Opens

Mike Grist Ghost Towns, Haikyo, Nagasaki 7 Comments

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.

Mt. Fuji’s mysterious underground vault

Mike Grist Haikyo, Vaults, Yamanashi 35 Comments

The underground vault haikyo in the shadow of Mt. Fuji is one of the strangest abandoned structures I’ve yet explored. A double-doored double-walled walk-in safe with triple combination locks buried in a man-made mound in an unpopulated and obscure part of the Japanese countryside. Now its thick and weighty doors hang open and loose, and there’s nothing in the vault but for 5 odd logo/symbols on the wall, and no other clue as to its purpose but for the dedication in kanji on top of the dome- ‘in memory of our ancestors’.

Imposing entry hall to the vault.

I stumbled upon this bizarre spot by accident after exploring the nearby Resort Hotel. It was already getting late, the light was fading, and I almost passed the whole complex by in favor of getting an earlier train home. I’m glad I didn’t though, as buried between 2 spa/ryokan buildings and 4 mossed over tennis courts was this petite extravagance.

Visible from the nearby hotel haikyo.

At first I headed over to the tennis courts, shot through with reeds, then when heading back to look over the main buildings I saw the dome. It was fairly wide and also bearded with rushes. I stepped out on top and wondered what on earth it was. I saw a kanji dedication and figured it was just somebody’s idea of a memorial.

Above the dome.

‘To our ancestors.’

On a level with the vault.

I climbed into the nearby building and explored there- I’ll post about that next. From the roof though I could look down on the dome and see that there was actually an open entrance into it. I hurried on down.

The doorway led into the dome, down a short sheer concrete wall lichened green, with some light flowing in through the reinforced glass tiles in the ceiling. I turned the corner and was shocked to see the safe door, hanging half-open. I went to give it a tug- it was very heavy but opened smoothly as if oiled. Inside there was an empty space, and inside that another safe with thick walls. This one was open too.

The only light source.

This old thing was long dead.

Lo,  a walk-in safe.

Three dials and a huge unlocking wheel.

3 dials of 90 points each.  That’s incredibly secure.

Reverse of the locking mechanism.

Logo detail.

On the inside were 5 strange logos/symbols on the wall. I’ve since asked lots of Japanese people if they recognize any of these, but nobody does. What are they? The central design, the red suns grinning, looks like something cultish. The blue one looks like a bank’s logo. The others- the top one may be the kanji for ‘winter’, the right one says- ‘big one’, and the left one I have no idea.

Do you know? ** UPDATE at bottom**

Suicide cult?

Standing (creeping myself out with thoughts of burial alive) in the vault mouth.

Besides that there was nothing inside. I didn’t want to step too far in or linger too long out of some irrational fear that someone might slip up behind me and slam the locks to all the safes closed with me inside, then I’d be trapped in a scenario out of the Saw movies- left with some hideous choice for survival.

I didn’t linger.

I made some short video of me going in and out:


Underground Vault Haikyo from Michael John Grist on Vimeo.

** UPDATED **

We’ve since learned that the main logo belonged to a securities company called Sanyo, not the same one that produces tech. Lee of Tokyo Times unearthed a Sanyo company magazine bearing their logo in a nearby part of what was clearly their resort complex. The safe would doubtless have held important company papers, stocks, bonds, and etc.. It was probably a bit of a vanity thing to keep it themselves, in such a location, but I’m sure it impressed their investors.

Read through all the comments below to follow the investigative process.

Additionally, the red face logo (in the center) was surely put there by another haikyo explorer. I’ve seen the same thing in many haikyo all around Japan. It’s that explorer’s calling card I guess.

See more of MJG’s Japanese ruins (haikyo) in the galleries:

[album id=4 template=compact]

You can also see a curation of world ruins in the ruins gallery.

Storm Watcher

Mike Grist Stories, Surreal 2 Comments

The storm-post was made of crumbling old red brick. Ragged weeds grew up its chipped and tattered sides, through its paving stones and round the observation platform binoculars on its roof. The grindstone railings that once prevented tourists from falling over the edge had collapsed inwards in a landslide a long time ago.

Its windows were all broken or cracked. At night the long low mountain winds rushed cold down its halls draped with autumnal leaves, crinkling in the dry air. Stockrooms filled with ancient paraphernalia all had a low white carpet of snow.

Once it had been a place filled with people, tourists come to see the volcano spume and smoke, then the storms came, the avalanches began, and the people left.

There were still cars in the parking lot, their black tires faded and deflated, their metal rusting slowly under the weight of time and ice. It was a dead place. A place of cold, and wind, and long-forgotten memories.

And the Storm-watcher.

His name had once mattered to him. He had had a job once, and a life and a family, somewhere in the world. He once drove a car and cashed checks, spent his money on groceries and spent evenings watching movies with his children.

Now he walked the battered storm-post, once a museum, and watched the skies over the volcano top for signs of the coming storm.

mountaincrop11

Image from here.

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Ruins of Gulliver’s Kingdom, Japan

Mike Grist Haikyo, Theme Parks, Yamanashi 21 Comments

Gulliver once rested in the shadow of Mt.Fuji, bound and nailed to the ground by the hair. His giant body was the main attraction of the now defunct and dismembered Gulliver’s Kingdom Theme Park in the shadow of Mt. Fuji, built in 1997, closed in 2001 due to defaulting bank loans, and demolished around 2007.

Perhaps a contributing factor to its ultimate failure was the proximity of Kamikuishiki- a small village that was the main base for the cult Aum Shinrikyo at the time of their deadly 1995 Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. Tourists on a day-trip with the kids to a theme-park would have been likely to steer clear. Now every reminder of the place is gone, the village has been rezoned, and the name Kamikuishiki removed from all maps.

Image from here.

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Tuesday’s Links

Mike Grist Uncategorized 1 Comment

Urban Explorer Rankings– Hilarious list of the XP ‘levelling’ structure of urban explorers, including pre-requisities and special skills conferred.

Level 3 (of 9) Pre-requisities:

 1 x hallway photo, open doors optional
    1 x apology thread, when called out for graffiti painted earlier in exploration career
    1 x evidence of partaking in a media article/show where you have defined urban exploration
    1 x evidence of thinking you are a ninja

Level 3 (of 9) Skills Conferred

Forum Owner:        One gains the ability to start their own forum to further their position in
                        in the community.
Nudity:             Explorer is now able to (poorly) augment their photos with nude models (fetish
                        type images not included).
Gimmicks (adv):     Explorer gains the ability to utilise various novelty cameras - holgas, lomos
                        polaroids etc to boost their artistic credibility. Also, one develops immunity
                        to their egregious use of a fish-eye lens.

I think I’m between level 2 and 3. I started taking art photos of myself in haikyo, started my own forum, but haven’t yet defined urban exploring to anyone.

Hotel Royal HaikyoPaul of Survivorship and Brian of Gaijinbash (who first found the Hotel Royal and tipped me off to it) go together to check out the Hotel Royal and find it much changed from the time of my visit.

My new Haikyo forum! – I don’t know if we’ll use it, but it’s there, as I found no other forum in Japan for non-J haikyoists.

Pearl Love Hotel Haikyo– Mike and I went together on this, I won’t post for a few weeks yet though so you can enjoy his first.