The ruined Heian Wedding Hall in Ibaraki prefecture is a far cry from the Akeno Gekijo Strip Club that preceded it. Here was a wholly wholesome building, built for the profession and binding of love’s vows, decorated in the most tasteful manner with Adam and Eve mounted on winged steeds in stained-glass friezes. Despite graffiti artists lending a flurry of darker images, amongst them switch-blade toting junkies and rabid giant spiders scuttling over everything, we both felt quite at peace while strolling the large complex’s moss-carpeted corridors and open-sky halls.
In my guidebook this wedding hall did not look too impressive, with just a shot of a bride and groom sat atop a cake and nothing really evidencing its ruined status. Paul mentioned it to me a few times though as a famous ruin on the net, so I figured SY and I would tack it on to the impromptu road trip we took one rainy Sunday several weeks back. It turned out to be not at all bad, principally for some of the graffiti, sillier love hotel-ish ‘wedding’ regalia, and the great hall open to the sky and spattered with burns, moss, and bits of paper everywhere.
We explored together, both of us snapping away. At one point some kids arrived at the entrance-way and conducted some kind of drug deal (I’m glamorizing, it was probably a Pokemon trade-off or something.) for a little while. We ignored them, tracing the spider tracks throughout the building and ultimately summiting the roof, and they went away soon enough.
The stairs to the roof were very feeble and rusted through in places, so as usual I badgered SY to be careful going up. At the top we wanted to look into the bell-tower, but it was really a fake bell tower, just a folly with no access and presumably only a model bell inside.
I took a few HDR photos but they didn’t turn out so good, you can see one of them in the gallery below. The best things are the grafitti shots probably. I really liked all the spiders.
The video is a very simple walkthrough.
Heian Wedding Hall Haikyo from Michael John Grist on Vimeo.
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FACTFILE
Location – Ibaraki.
Entry – Easy, straight in.
Highlights – Grafitti spiders, open-air hall.
RUINS / HAIKYO
You can see all MJG’s Ruins / Haikyo explorations here:
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