After the grand luck of Dom and Liduina contacting me for a wedding haikyo shoot a few months back, I figured I couldn`t bank on the same thing happening again. If I wanted to shoot models in haikyo more, I`d have to get out there and find them myself. So I put out a casting call, not sure if anyone would reply. Well, several did, which was great. The first I organized a shoot with was Sara, at the Keishin Hospital.
Relics of the Keishin Hospital 3. Graffiti
Often ruins have a few tags littering their walls, messages and names left by some dumb-asses in their bid for eternal glory. Scrawls, defacements, junk.
Relics of the Keishin Hospital 2. HDR
Keishin Hospital was once a pre-eminent site of super high-tech radiology equipment, leading the charge as Japan raced into the modern era. Some 2o years ago that dream fell by the way-side though, and the place was left to the vandals. They tore out everything that could be torn out, leaving only a few metal fixtures too heavily stapled down. Then came the taggers, followed by the true grafitti artists, and the young people shooting documentaries, and the cosplay kids playing truant from school. Keishin has a whole other life, now that it’s dead. In this part we’ll look mostly …
Small Pox Isolation Ward Haikyo
Small Pox was once an incurable killer, claiming around 400 million deaths in the first half of the 20th century before its eradication. The people who contracted it were likely to die, and had to be removed from the general population lest they spread the infection to others. The Small Pox Isolation Ward Haikyo set into a then-remote Izu cliff-side was one such place they’d be banished to, to endure the agonies of their disease while lying on a straw mattress in a wooden shack, looking out to the sea and waiting to die.
Collect your free drugs from this forgotten hospital
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, packets and vials of medicine lie side by side with discarded medical records and X-ray equipment on its shelves, 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.
Memories of Nichitsu 4. The Dr.’s brain in a jar
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, birthing stirrups lying in puddles of water and moss, leather dentistry chairs ripped and spewing foam, ancient defibrillators on window-sills, walls lined with shelves stocked with bottles of nondescript pills and musty tinctures, documents sheafed and scattered everywhere, surgical clamps in heaps and organs floating in formaldehyde jars. …
The Mad Ruins of Kentucky’s Waverley Hills Sanatorium
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- their bodies trundled out down the ‘Body Chute’ by night so as not to disturb the other patients. Described as one of America’s most haunted locations, Waverley boasts a total body count of around 60,000 over its 51 year life-span. It was shut down in 1961 as TB was gradually being eradicated, changed hands a number of …
Stunning Graffiti in the Ruined Keishin Hospital
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. Up close its walls are a vibrant cacophony of ever-changing grafitti, its forecourt a wash of shattered glass and empty spray-paint cans, its encircling car park overgrown with a thick smog of twisted brown underbrush. All record of its previous life has been erased by decades of vandalism, theft, and neglect.