The abandoned dental school that became a giant nest

Mike Grist Haikyo, Ibaraki, Schools 3 Comments

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.

Nichitsu 2. Elementary school in a Ghost Town

Mike Grist Ghost Towns, Haikyo, Saitama, Schools 16 Comments

At the dead-end of a blast-hewn road snaking up through the mountains north of Tokyo, imprisoned by sheer moss-rocked walls looming overhead like rotting Gothic colonnades, 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 standing guard at the mine entrance, looking out of cracked windows, walking their habitual paths to and from and back again.

Nichitsu 1. The Ghost Town’s Junior High School

Mike Grist Ghost Towns, Haikyo, Saitama, Schools 4 Comments

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 timber apartments, the children at the large wooden high school, and the men down in the mines digging for tin. But that was at least 20 years ago- since then the town has been relentlessly pounded by avalanches and ravaged by decay. All around the buildings stand with their roofs and walls caved in, …