Ruins / Haikyo

Japan’s myriad haikyo (or ruins) are quickly becoming famous- both within the country and around the web, and it’s no surprise as there are just so darn many of them, often at such ridiculous scales, with such ridiculous design motifs, all left exactly as they were when abandoned. In other countries perhaps these giant theme parks and gorgeous old museums would have been torn down, or preserved as history, but not here. Here they moulder, rot, and sink into the past even as the world moves on around them.

Yamamoto Grand Center	BE labs Resort Hotel

The Yamamoto Grand Center is a gracefully aging architectural joy, tucked away in a quiet corner of Tochigi prefecture on a die-cut volcanic crag. Once its spacious halls hosted large functions and company retreats, children played in its courtyard and newlyweds posed for photographs by its sheer rock wall. Now it is empty; warm spring winds blow through its many gaping windows, old receipts and leaflets flutter in zephyrs around its stacked and musty furniture, and weeds grow up in the moulding grass mats of its once grand hall.	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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Yamanakako Resort Hotel	Yamanakako Spa Resort

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. Pyramidal heaps of wall-paper slowly mildew in the wind-swept hallways alongside racks of wooden drywall frames, all of it written off and forgotten about when the economy collapsed.	The Yamanakako Spa Resort Hotel in Yamanashi prefecture was an unremarkable complex, a simple red brick structure set off from the road on a slight hill. The first building in the complex wasÂ bland on the inside,Â but the second had more to offer;Â a spacious main function space spread with beautifully crinkled red floor tiles, cocooned byÂ a curved glass-wall exterior, dotted withÂ small privateÂ onsen, and guarded by theÂ dead and dessicated corpse of a bristly wild pig.
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Shin Shu Kanko Hotel	Gan Kutsu Cliff Face Hotel

The Shin Shu Kanko Hotel in Nagano is a leviathan beast, 3 whale-sized buildings interlinked by encircling roads, interior corridors, underground passages and a long bridging escalator. The largest of the 3 is seven stories high with easily 100 rooms along its spine, with huge onsen, function rooms, izakaya and a hall, all of it empty, trashed, and creaking in the wind.	The Gan Kutsu Cliff Face Hotel in Saitama is the relic of a dream, one man’s vision to carve out a massive hotel in the sheer rock face, working alone with only a chisel for 21 years until the day he died in 1925. The work was completed after his death, with a false facade slapped in white brick over the entrance to make it more appealing. It was closed after about 60 years due to cave-ins, the false facade stripped away, and all ways in and out strapped with iron bars.
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Sun Hills Hotel Car Park	Red Blossom Restaurant

The remnants of the Sun Hills Hotel in Kanagawa lay hunkered down and spartan on the banks of Sagamiko lake, the blank concrete foundation of a proud edifice that never once opened to the public, hosting only the village’s truanting kids and vandals before it was unceremoniously torn down. Now only its 2-story underground car park remains, haunted by chirping crickets and wandering families on sight-seeing breaks.	The Red Blossom Restaurant Haikyo on the Lake Tama ring road rests as a peaceful shrine to the yin and yang of Nature, showing in gentle tones both her power to tear down the old, and raise up the new. The restaurant itself sits on a small hill like a rusted old tank, off-kilter, gap-toothed, and leering to the side.
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Tai-Hei-Yo Cement Plant	Cosplay Factory Haikyo

The Tai-Hei-Yo Cement Plant Haikyo in Chichibu, Saitama, was once one of Japan’s biggest producers of concrete, a massive complex woven through with miles of piping, studded with huge firing kilns, silos, 30-story smoke-stacks and immense clinker vats. Now it’s a half-demolished scrapyard, strewn with piles of twisted metal wreckage, yellow chemical pools, bulldozers and cranes.	It’s rare to meet other people while exploring abandonments- by definition they should be empty, like dried-out rice husks blown in the wind. However from time to time it happens, and you may run up against an old man inexplicably stripping wood from fallen paper screens, or a gang of High School kids noisily playing truant. Perhaps the apex meeting by chance would be to see people who really ‘belong’ there. I don’t mean homeless, or other haikyoists. I mean really belong.
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Ashiodozan 3. Power Hub and Mine	Ashiodozan 4. Factory and Train Station

Mining for Copper began in Ashio over 400 years ago, on the chance discovery of a surface lode by 2 farmers tilling their rocky topsoil. Shafts were dug and miners sent in, the process was commandeered by the Shogunate of Tokugawa Ieyasu, and production went into overdrive.	In Ashio Japan learned the true cost of industrialization, that of crippling environmental damage, as sulfuric acid from the factory numerous smelter chimneys coagulated in the atmosphere and fell as acid rain, poisoning the water table and blistering the mountains so all plant-life died.
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Yamanakako Underground Vault	Okutama Ropeway

The underground vault haikyo in Yamanashi 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 with its thick and weighty doors hanging open and loose, 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’.	Scrunched up behind thickets of winter-boned brush off the banks of a man-made lake, the last remaining carriage of the Okutama Ropeway hangs slack in its berthing perch. Once a completely false folly, it is now consigned to be the most natural thing there, with clotted brown leaves as its only passengers, vines clinging to the station walls the only attendants.
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Mt. Asama Volcano Museum	Toyo Bowl Bowling Alley

Up in the mountainous north-west corner of snowy Gunma prefecture, at the foot of the once-active volcano Mt. Asama, lies a beautifully weathered abandoned volcano museum. Ruptured by avalanche scree and scoured by the harsh winter winds rushing down the valley, it stands as a lone sentinel guarding the jagged granite slopes leading up to the volcano’s cone.	The Toyo Bowl in Kanagawa was a mammoth venture when first dreamed up, the second biggest bowling alley in the world behind the Nagoya Toyo Bowl, featuring 108 bowling lanes spread over 3 huge floors, along with a large pachinko hall, restaurants, gift shops, arcades, and a creche.
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Ashiodozan 1. History and Relics	Nichitsu 3. Town and Environs

Ashiodozan Mining Town in the mountains of Tochigi Prefecture is infamous in Japanese history as a site of extreme environmental damage- so much so the town was mostly abandoned 40 years ago, the mines and factory shut down, and virtually all of the people left. Now itâ€™s just a creaking conglomeration of fading facilities.	Nichitsu Ghost Town stretches dead and decaying for over a kilometer along its switch-backed mountain road, spreading from the barely-functioning mine shacks at the mouth of the last rough-cut tunnel, up past the Junior High School, twisting up past the white bulge of a hill of lime-chips, past the Doctor`s office hidden somewhere in the thicket of buildings, up to the Lower School, dorm, and warren of walkways, all still and silent but for the steady low gnawing of nature, and time.
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Dental School	Rojin Home

The Dental School Haikyo in Ibaraki is one giant nest, a big empty shell carpeted with straw and twittering with the sound of swooping birds. Every room, corridor, and hall is scattered with their off-cast building materials, feathers, droppings, and bodies. Broken EXIT signs, fire-hose cupboards, sinks and shattered fuse-boxes all serve as their homes, stuffed with rotten straw and twigs.	The Rojin (old folks) Home we stumbled across in Shizuoka was a happy accident, one of those random call-outs from the back seat of the car that normally go unheeded. We were searching for an abandoned hospital and having little luck- so the mere sight of anything remotely fenced-off fired up our blood and got us out there investigating.
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Osawa Apartments	Ashiodozan 2. Shrine and Apartments

The Osawa Apartments Haikyo in Sagamihara is a high-walled preserve for the recent past, shuttered in behind a plate-metal security fence 15 feet high. Inside, bicycles lie rusted in fallen racks, and 6-mat rooms rest empty behind locked screen doors, their tatami mat floors slowly bleaching white in the pale autumn sun.	Life in Ashio would never have been easy, and certainly not at the peak of production around 1910 when 39,000 people called it home. Many would have turned to the ‘kamisama’ or Gods for spiritual succor- especially as there were no cinemas, malls, or any other way to relieve the stresses of everyday life.
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Nichitsu 1. Junior High School	Nichitsu 2. Lower School

The abandoned Nichitsu Mining Town sits cramped into a narrow valley at the head of a long and buckled road in the mountainous western edge of Saitama. It was once a thriving company town with hundreds of families, the women staying at home in their rickety apartments, the children at the large wooden high school, and the men down in the mines digging for tin.	At the dead-end of a blast-hewn road snaking up through the canyons of North-East Saitama, the Nichitsu mine ghost town lies in wait, wreathed in a low mist and perennially dusk-lit by the overhanging crags. It hums with a crippling weight of nostalgia, of enfolded memories playing out again and again in its boarded up buildings, of invisible ghosts walking their habitual paths to and from and back again.
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Toyoshin Convalescent Centre	Nichitsu 4. Doctor’s Office

The Toyoshin Convalescent Centre is an oddity already sunk from the consciousness of the neighbouring area, something the local kids don’t even notice as they walk past it to and from school. No fences or barricades of any kind guard its door or driveways, but no-one ventures inside because- why would they? The place is a shell neither ominous nor dangerous- something old men potter around inside singing enka songs while searching for scrap firewood, a non-place already fading from existence.	Nichitsu is a tiny little village huddled in a chilly mountain pass, far from the nearest population center. Come an emergency the Doctor’s office would have been the only ER, so its few rooms were crammed full of equipment, now forgotten and lying in shadow: rusted iron operating tables, toppled X-ray machinery, documents sheafed and scattered everywhere, surgical clamps in heaps and organs floating in formaldehyde jars. All of it now sinking, as the floor-boards bow under the weight of 30 years of absence and neglect.
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Keishin Radiology Hospital	Waverley Hills Sanatorium

The gutted shell of the abandoned Keishin Hospital stands blank and ghostly on the rural Kanagawa sky-line. It once housed state-of-the-art radiology and cancer departments, now the only pieces of equipment remaining are the chairs bolted to the floor in the dentist’s office.	The Waverley Hills Sanatorium in Jefferson County, Kentucky, opened in 1910 in the thick of a Tuberculosis groundswell, then an incurable disease rife in the swampy backwaters of rural Loisville. The infected went to Waverley to be quarantined, and most likely to die- now the current owners hope to re-furbish and re-open it as a haunted hotel.
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Negishi Racecourse Grandstand	Negishi Plateau Caverns

The Negishi Racecourse Grandstand in Yokohama looms like an ancient 3-headed Titan over the Negishi Plateau. It once drew crowds of thousands to cheer from its elaborate bleachers, to wander its long hallways and admire its extravagant architecture.	Deep within the solid rock of the Negishi Plateau in Yokohama, spreading beneath the old race-course Grandstand and Yokosuka Naval Base, lies a twisting warren of hidden World War Two era caverns, reportedly filled with ancient munitions and top-secret military dossiers.
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US Air Force Base	Hyaku Ana Cliff Tombs

The abandoned US Air Force (USAF) base in Fuchu is a vine-slathered memento from the early days of Japanese/American peace. Its huge twin parabolic dishes are still visible from the exterior- though now half-eaten up by the passing decades, rusted red and bobbing like hole-riddled yachts on the sea of green jungle.	The Hyaku Ana Cliff Tombs in Saitama are ancient, easily some of the oldest ruins in all of Japan, dating back 1300 years to a time of almost pre-history. A second layer of history was added in the Second World War when deep munitions tunnels were carved into the rock; gloomy storage spaces to keep serious weaponry safe from Allied bombing raids. Now the tunnels are well-lit and echo with the sound of clattering children, the deeper recesses fenced off with metal portcullis walls.
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Kemigawa Transmission Station	Akasaka Love Hotel

On December 2nd 1941, just 6 days before the Japanese opened hostilities in the Pacific War against the Allies by bombing Pearl Harbour, a coded signal went out from the Kemigawa Transmission Station in Tochigi: ãƒ‹ã‚¤ã‚¿ã‚«ãƒ¤ãƒžãƒŽãƒœãƒ¬ 1208, or CLIMB MT. NIITAKA 1208; the order to join the war. CLIMB MT. NIITAKA referred to Niitaka mountain, the tallest in all of the then-Japanese Empire (now Taiwan). 1208 referred to the date of commencement- the 8th of December Japan time, the day the Japanese surprise-attacked Hawaii.	The Akasaka Love Hotel Haikyo in Higashi-Yamato, Tokyo, clearly suffered for lack of passing traffic. Inside, its gaudy rooms still sing of forbidden pleasures, the walls plastered with bright helios, lurking cheetahs, and naked Bathshebaâ€™s, though I doubt any lusty couples have joined in their bawdy chorus for some time..
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Pearl Love Hotel	Yui Grand Love Hotel

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.	The Yui Grand Love Hotel is an abandonment with a more sordid past than usual, if urban legend is to be believed. According to the story, a gang of bosozoku riders kidnapped a schoolgirl into one of its rooms, where they abused and killed her. I’ve no idea if that is true, but stories of her haunting of the place are apparently so rife that people actually queue up outside at night to go into the room where she died, to hear her ghostly wails. All in very poor taste, and again I’ve no idea if there’s any truth to it.
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Queen Chateau Soapland	Hotel Royal

The Queen Chateau Soapland Haikyo in Mito, Ibaraki, is at once a grand but squalid folly. A bath-based brothel rising 5 fairy-tale stories into the sky, cornered with towers and capped with bright red tile, it represents an era gone mad with indulgence, audacity, and hopefulness.	The Royal Hotel haikyo in Kanagawa is the grand-daddy of all love hotels, streaking 7 empty stories up into the big blue sky, a giant vermillion flag on the banks of Sagamiko Lake calling out to all and sundry in a mega-watt alto- ‘Need some discreet time alone with your loved one? Come on down!’
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Gulliver’s Kingdom (RIP)	Namegawa Island Bird Park

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 Yamanashi, built in 1997, closed in 2001 due to defaulting bank loans, and demolished around 2007.Image from here .	Namegawa Island is a big failed bird theme park, one that up until fairly recently held its own against the twin Disneys standing astride the Chiba peninsula, past which any bird-aficionados would have to run the gauntlet to reach it. It sits perched on a precarious jag of forested coastline, completely blockaded from the mainland by a wide swath of mountains stretching from edge to edge, accessible only through tunnels that are now thoroughly gated and barbed.
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Sports World Theme Park	Sports World Water Park

Sports World occupies an idyllic position at the crown of the Izu peninsula, overlooking a wide swathe of richly forested mountains and valleys. In its heyday it was a sports and relaxation haven, featuring tennis courts, miniature golf, a dive pool, restaurants, a hotel, a huge wave pool, a spa, and a gym.	The Sports World Water Park in Izu is a well-hidden gem in the crown of Japan’s abandoned theme parks. Tucked away from the main theme park down a slim passage over-awed by rabid weeds, its brilliant blue umbilical water-slides snaking and inter-twining through the verdant green jungle canopy.
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Russian Village Theme Park	Kappa Pia Theme Park

The Russian Village Theme Park in Suibara, Niigata, sprawls empty and forlorn atop a small hill set back from the main road, its giant fake mammoths resting unseen in their dark and musty show hall, and the vibrant blue onion-domes of its vaulting ‘Russian’ church slowly tarnishing to white.	The Kappa Pia Theme Park in Saitama prefecture was in the process of being demolished when I went to see it. The grand rusted rollercoasters, creaking tea-cup rides, teddy bear-winning sideshows and themed restaurants I’d hoped to see were all gone, leaving nothing but bare concrete platforms with rust-pocked rivet marks where rides had once been.
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6 Responses to “Ruins / Haikyo”

David Meyer says:

February 17, 2009 at 5:18 pm

What a sadly awesome page. “Ozymandius East”.
Japanese Abandoned Love Hotel | Nerdcore says:

February 18, 2009 at 9:23 pm

[...] von â€žReturn of the Jediâ€œ herumrottet, dann kann ich ja wohl nicht anders. Ãœberhaupt ist die Abandoned Fotografie von Michael John Grist ziemlich toll, darunter verlassene Wasserrutschen und ein Vulkan-Museum (am FuÃŸ eines [...]
Nichitsu Ghost Town 3. Town and Environs | michael john grist says:

February 20, 2009 at 6:59 pm

[...] Ruins / Haikyo [...]
Val says:

June 13, 2009 at 10:08 am

Great shots! I’d love to visit places like those, it looks amazing, yet quite frightening! How do you find them?
MJG says:

June 13, 2009 at 12:27 pm

David- Beautiful, and great title actually. Maybe I’ll steal?

Val- Thanks so much, about half come from a book I have, and the other half from various tip-offs or random finds of my own. Only really frightening when I’ve gone solo, and at night. With friends it’s more just like fun.
Cheap Bowling Balls says:

June 22, 2009 at 12:09 am

This is the first time I’ve commented here and I must say you give genuine, and quality information for bloggers! Great job.
p.s. You have an awesome template for your blog. Is it a free template or did you have it designed especially for you, I’d love to talk to your designer !?