Ghost Towns are the ultimate haikyo experience. If you long to be Indiana Jones, this is where you need to go. This is where the mystery is, whole towns that died. 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 rotten food, left as they were.
If you’re feeling brave, go at night. Stay over in someone’s old home. The scope for terrifying experiences, ghostly encounters, and forging a connection to the recent past are legion. I dare you.
Taro Great Machine Hall |
Osarizawa Chemical Pools |
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| The derelict Taro mine lies at a generational crossing point- once a place where raw sulfides were dug from the earth, now it functions as a cosmic ray laboratory for a nearby University, capturing electrons from outer space in several large heavily wired pools. It was the first of four mines on our Iwate shopping list, ranked number 3 in all of East Japan. | Mining of gold and copper at the legendary Osarizawa mine began around 1330 years ago, with the last of the smelting facilities closing down in 1978. Now the site is owned by Mitsubishi, who run guided tours around the highlights and a museum for 1,000 yen- a tour we almost got chain-ganged into joining. |
Matsuo Apartment Blocks
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The lonely ore-cart of Seigoshi Mine |
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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. | 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. |
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. |
Nichitsu 3. Town and Environs |
Nichitsu 4. Doctor’s Office |
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| 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. | 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. |
Ashiodozan 1. History and Relics |
Ashiodozan 2. Shrine and Apartments |
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| 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 it’s just a creaking conglomeration of fading facilities. | 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. |
Ashiodozan 3. Power Hub and Mine |
Ashiodozan 4. Factory and Train Station |
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| 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. |
The haikyoist must be prepared to sit in any chair at any time, due to the fatigue caused by having to walk around a bit.
Delathon Rent, a 28 year old technician on the Freya 13 space station, sits slumped in the Outer rim command pod.
The US detonated hundreds of nuclear bombs as tests on the Marshall Islands in the middle of the Pacific.
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| By N2H | ||||||||
on All the Demolished Haikyo
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