Places where people moved, lived, and studied, are always redolent of the lives they lived, the times they lived in. Fragments of chalk by the blackboard, whiskey bottles in the staff room, notes carved into desks, all memories of people who’ve long moved on.
Matsuo Apartment Blocks
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| Matsuo mine in the north of Japan opened in 1914 and closed in 1969. In its heyday it was the biggest mine for sulfur in the Eastern world. It had a workforce of 4,000 and a wider population of 15,000, all of whom were accomodated in a make-shift city in the mountains of Hachimantai park. The city was known as the ‘paradise above the clouds’ for its comparatively luxurious apartment blocks and near-constant ebb and flow of mist. That same mist nearly prevented us from finding the place at all. | |
Dental School
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Rojin Home
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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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Haikyoing is kind of an addiction. Every time I get back from a long haikyo weekend I think I`m done, it`s enough, but it never is.
At the center of Flatland there was a tall sky-scraper, thirty stories high. In the skyscraper were many offices, filled with workers.
The Earth's face is a pock-marked, scarified thing, riddled with enormous mines and mysterious craters, chasms and deep blue holes.
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| By N2H | ||||||||
on All the Demolished Haikyo
on Diggnation!
on Diggnation!
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