Ever since The Shining the lonely hotel on a rocky outcrop has been a premier location for seeking out ghostly activity and spine-tingling adventure. Memories of the past flit down their once-plush corridors, ghosts of concierges, bell-boys, and cleaning maids whisper by you with every cold draft. Venture into the dark if you dare.
Okawa Grand Hotel
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Shimoda Grand Hotel |
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| 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. | 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. |
Yamamoto Grand Center
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BE labs Resort Hotel
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| 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. |
Yamanakako Resort Hotel |
Yamanakako Spa Resort
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| 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 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. |
Shin Shu Kanko Hotel |
Gan Kutsu Cliff Face Hotel |
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| 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. |
Sun Hills Hotel Car Park |
Red Blossom Restaurant |
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| 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. |
Love hotels and soaplands closed down and decayed, spilling their bright and tawdry innards out like confetti.
The Sky Painter lived on the mountain and painted the sky. He painted it blue for blue skies, and white and grey for clouds.
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 Top 10 Haikyo
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