Yashima Cable Car – Lower Terminus

Being a mountainous country Japan has lots of cable cars and ropeways. And it seems like every single one of them was built in the late 1920s / early 1930s. A lot of them were demolished after just a couple of years in the 1940s to support the war efforts of Imperial Japan (every piece of metal counted…) – amongst others the *Mount Atago Cable Car* and the *Rokko Ropeway*. The Yashima Cable Car (YCC) had a bit more luck. Opened on April 21st 1929 it too was suspended as a nonessential line on February 11th 1944. But although some material was taken away (I’m not sure what exactly though…) it didn’t mean the end of the YCC: On April 16th 1950 the Yashima Cable Car opened again for business. And business was good thanks to the famous Yashima Shrine on top of Mount Yashima, about a kilometer away from the YCC terminal. I guess it got even better when some businessmen decided to make Mount Yashima a full-blown tourist attraction (*you can read all about it here*), but when the plan fell through the Yashima Cable Car was in trouble, too. On October 16th 2004 operations were suspended again, but it took almost a year (August 31st 2005) until the line was officially closed and abandoned.
According to a tourist guide book first published in the 1980s the cable car ran from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., charging 1160 Yen for the roundtrip. It seems like prices went up and service hours were cut down, so in 1999 the cable car ran every 20 minutes from 8 a.m. to 5.40 p.m., charging 700 Yen one way and 1300 Yen for a roundtrip.
At the time of my visit the lower terminus of the Yashima Cable Car (屋島登山口駅, yashima tozanguchi eki – Yashima Trailhead Station) stood locked-up and abandoned on the foot of Mount Yashima near the trailhead up the mountain. The road leading there was almost as abandoned – I could vividly imagine how good business must have been 20, 30 years ago for the now closed restaurants and souvenir shops. Right next to the station were a taxi stand and a metalworking company, making some noise and keeping an eye on the inaccessible station building. The 858 meter long cable car track was accessible though, with car #1 parked right at the platform. And it was beautiful! On the one hand it was hard to believe that the place had been abandoned just six years ago, on the other hand there were no signs of vandalism and everything had just the right amount of decay – and the beautiful weather on the day of my visit didn’t hurt the atmosphere either…

Onsen Town Theater

Onsen Town Theater

Hot Spring Theater – that’s what was written in four kanji (温泉劇場, onsen gekijo) at the front of the building. And this was clearly a euphemism in many ways. First of all: The small building didn’t look like a theater at all. Which isn’t a surprise, because “hot spring theater” is common code for a Japanese strip club in an onsen town. So the only play on the stage of this theater was happening between the hand of “actress” and the rest of her body… I guess what set the Onsen Town Theater apart from a classic strip club was the fact that the stage looked like a theater stage and didn’t extend into the audience. Full frontal! The seats by the way were gone, so basically all we had was a dark empty room and a dull stage in a rather inconspicuous building. If it wouldn’t have been for some signs stored in a room next to the entrance *Michael* and I might have missed the stage and therefore the purpose of the building. Smaller signs at the counter of the main entrance announced the rather steep admission charge of 2.600 Yen and the fact that you had to be 18 years old to enter. I’m still not sure though if the Onsen Town Theater really was a strip club or maybe rather a brothel – or both. The building had a second floor and up there were not only a couple of small rooms and a seedy looking waiting area. Right at the top of the stairs was another counter with a surprisingly low and small opening with curtains – and behind the counter I saw quite a few paper slips looking like receipts. Did the performing ladies live up here? Or did they offer extra services? I guess we’ll never know…

And with this little mystery my report about the *road trip to southern Kyushu* ends. Right on time, because tomorrow the Gakuranman and I will leave for another road trip. Urbex in Okinawa – here we come!

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Noga Hotel

„The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.“

Well, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Sir, Mr. President. That’s not entirely accurate. But you’ve most likely never been into urban exploration… As an urban explorer there is one other thing you have to fear and most urbexers do fear: watchdogs. It took me more than 150 explorations to finally run into one, but that one proved to be an insurmountable hurdle. Not only for myself, but also for my haikyo buddy *Michael*.
On the way up to the Noga Hotel we stopped to take a couple of photos from the foot of the mountain as it was already early afternoon and we most likely wouldn’t have the chance to take some on the way down. Little did we know that those would be the only photos of the Noga Hotel we’d take that day…

Halfway up the mountain we were stopped by a gate blocking the street – decorated with four huge signs telling us why we shall not pass. A seemingly endless list starting at private property up ahead (so what, this was a public road…) and ending with the local cities authorities trying to prevent illegal waste disposal and forest fires; well, who could argue with environmental reasons that are pleaded to keep people away from an abandoned hotel that is falling apart? Right, we could, so we opened the gate and continued driving, but soon we decided that it might not be a good idea, since an unlocked gate means that whoever decided to put it there actually wants people to pass – which meant that we would most likely run into somebody at one point or the other. So we went back down the mountain and walked up again. A very good decision, because just a couple of 100 meters after the point where we turned around the car we found a second gate. Not just a gate, more like a checkpoint. I was walking a couple of meters ahead of Michael when I saw the control point and it took just a few seconds for a watchdog to bark as if there was no tomorrow. So I ran. Although going to the gym 4 times a week I haven’t been running that fast since I was caught by the security guard at *Nara Dreamland*. Luckily just down the road was a fenced off deadlock; a fence to prevent cars, not humans. So we ran down that road to hide from whatever might have followed us and waited. And waited. And waited. Until Michael decided to have a look at the checkpoint himself – I preferred to wait at the hideout. While Michael was away I heard another big dog barking, probably from where the hotel was – Michael on the other hand only heard some animal scratching as he told me when he came back. Which was at the exact same moment when a van on the way down passed the fence of the dead end road, causing us keep our heads down for another couple of minutes. While I was willing to admit defeat and move on to another location Michael really wanted to get to the hotel, although it was getting late afternoon already; either passing the checkpoint or straight ahead up the mountain through the forest, path or not. Having been lost in the mountain before I strongly objected to the latter idea, so we agreed that Michael would first check if somebody from the van was waiting at our car and then come up again to have a really close look at the checkpoint. Maybe the dog was gone?
About two minutes after I received a text message that the car was clear 4 more vans passed my position on the way down – I tried to call Michael, but it was already too late. When he reached me out of breath several minutes later he told me that the guys in the vans ignored him completely. Neither for the first time nor for the last time on our *road trip to southern Honshu* I asked myself the question when you can consider a place really abandoned. Or if abandonment is the basis for urban exploration. The grey area between exploration and infiltration – and that a place somebody hires security for is not really abandoned by the word’s true meaning. But I guess that’s part of the beauty of that hobby, too. Everybody defines those lines for themselves. The same applies for graffiti. To me they are a form of vandalism when put onto abandoned buildings (I like them as art on designated areas or canvas!), and I guess I’m also more conservative (or cautious – or cowardly?) when it comes to explorations as I’m trying to avoid trouble; except for *Nara Dreamland*: I visited that place against better judgement way too often!

Against better judgement I also agreed to walk up to the checkpoint again as Michael was eager to try his luck as a dog whisperer – or preferably talking to a security guard, if there was one. We were about to get back to the main road when the sound of motors made us hide again. Four more cars went down the mountain and we finally agreed that we won’t make it to the Noga Hotel that way that day. But maybe on another day or sneaking up a different way…

Top 5 Reasons Why Golden Week Sucks

If you are a regular reader of this blog you know that I usually don’t stray much from urban exploration, but this week inspired me to a little rant about one of Japan’s holy cows: Golden Week. Still related to urban exploration as it massively affected my explorations this year…
What is Golden Week? Golden Week is a rather massive accumulation of public holidays in Japan in late April and early May.
April 29th: Showa Day / 昭和の日 / shōwa no hi (being dedicated to Emperor Showa / Hirohito who reigned from 1926 to 1989 – his controversial role in WW2 is still disputed…)
May 3rd: Constitution Memorial Day / 憲法記念日 / kenpō kinenbi
May 4th: Greenery Day / みどりの日 / midori no hi
May 5th: Children’s Day / こどもの日 / kodomo no hi (widely known as Boys’ Day / 端午の節句 / tango no sekku – have you ever seen photos of those colourful carp banners? They are related to this day…)
With that many national holidays close to each other you have to take two or three days off and can be absent from for a whole week (or as a Japanese friend counts it: taking off 9 days) – and Japanese people, usually known for being reluctant to take off days from work even if they are sick, do exactly that in large numbers. In fact so many people take off days from work during Golden Week that you actually kinda have to justify yourself if you don’t do it. Or as a Japanese proverb says: the nail that sticks out gets hammered down. You really don’t wanna stick out…
This sudden increase of spare time for a lot of people, glorified by the term Golden Week, of course comes with a couple of detriments that are widely ignored since… well, it’s friggin Golden Week and everybody has to love it! Like New Year’s Eve parties and Christmas with the whole family…
So I will say publicly what most Japanese wouldn’t even dare to say on the quiet: Golden Week sucks! Big time!
Most of the points on the list are interacting with (or are depending on) each other, so the order is kind of interchangeable.

5.) Forced paid vacation days
When you are an employee of a Japanese company in Japan you usually don’t get a lot of paid vacation days. Between 10 and maybe 15 per year the most – a ridiculous amount to the 25 to 36 (!) I’m used to in my home country of Germany. There are no sick days either. So even if you have to go to a doctor you have to take half a day off to see one on your own time and partially on your own dime (co-payment is 30% with the standard health insurance – of anything! Consultation, medication, …). While a lot of Japanese people jump on the idea of taking two days off to create a week of not going to work others are reluctant to do that – because they actually have work to do, because they don’t feel like going on vacation, especially when everybody is going (see #4, #3, and #2), because… whatever reason. So some companies use the opportunity to flush out those two or three vacation days by “recommending” their employees to take them off. And by Japanese communication standards “recommending” means “ordering”. Last year the company I work for used the opportunity of Golden Week to install new ACs after recommending everybody to take days off, making it virtually impossible to not follow the recommendation. Sure, I could have made a fuzz and insisted on moving to floors where no installation work was going on – but that would have been pretty much like pissing in the face of an LA cop after he stopped you for drunk driving…

4.) Prices increase massively
A lot of people use the free week to travel – visiting family and going on vacation. Since prices depend on supply and demand the costs for hotels, train and airplane tickets, rental cars and in some case even food rise significantly. JR charges a special “high season” surcharge for seat reservations and hotels tend to charge holiday prices even for the non-holiday days of Golden Week – but special prices are not a rarity in general; and those are not special discount offers…

3.) Everything is crowded
No matter where you go, everything is crowded. Hotels are fully booked often weeks in advance. The non-reservation cars of Shinkansen superexpress trains are so crowded that JR employees ask travellers not to get on even before the train arrives at a station – and that happened to me at 6 a.m.! You have insanely long waiting lines in front of restaurants and at amusement parks; that’s crazy busy even by the standards of a country where the first opening of a Coldstone Creamery ice cream shop created waiting lines of up to two hours for weeks!

2.) No spontaneity
In daily (work) life I often have the feeling that Japanese people can’t plan. Hell, some colleagues have the job title of “Planner” and they wouldn’t be able to plan their way out of a paper back. But that’s not entirely true. Japanese people can plan if you give them enough time to do so – hence the intervals of as little as 2.5 minutes on Tokyo’s Yamanote Line, a train loop line in the city centre of Japan’s capital.
What most Japanese people have a hard time with is improvising – when things don’t go according to plan a lot of them are in deep trouble. So I guess Golden Week really caters to the Japanese way of living. You plan it weeks or even months ahead of time and it doesn’t really matter that there is absolutely no chance for spontaneity – everything is set in stone anyways.
I’m a person that is extremely well organized at work and I’m fairly adaptable to unforeseen situations; especially since it’s part of my job. In my spare time I like to mix up things a little bit. When I plan an urbex trip I have an idea of the locations I want to see, but I always have alternatives ready, just in case I need or want to change plans. Usually I don’t book hotels in advance and I don’t make seat reservations on trains as I feel it would lock me down too much. What if I want to stay at a location shorter or longer? Or switch orders for whatever reasons? I like to keep it flexible. Which really backfired this week and inspired me to write down what I was thinking for years: Golden Week sucks!
I went down to Northern Kyushu to explore a couple of locations I was longing to see for months or even years. When I arrived in my beloved Sasebo I was told that there were no rooms available. At all. Not a single one for one night. I was aware of the risk, but it always worked out so far, so I asked the lovely ladies at the local tourist information to phone around after I went to the usual suspects myself. After more than a dozen calls and to the growing frustration of my helpers they finally found a ryokan on Oshima with a room available – Oshima was on my way to revisit Ikeshima, so it was a perfect match. My Japanese isn’t great, so I only spoke English at the tourist information, but I understand a little bit of the local language. After the tourist office lady told me that she found a room I heard her telling the ryokan staff in Japanese that was American (which I’m not, but I guess every white person speaking decent English is automatically classified as American) and if that would be okay. And all of a sudden the room situation was difficult (muzukashii, むずかしい). If something is “difficult” in Japan it basically means that it is not going to happen – the reason doesn’t matter. It’s difficult and nobody wants to deal with difficult situation, so that’s it. While “yes” usually means “I understand” and not necessarily “yes, that is what we are going to do”, “difficult” is the polite version of “no”; or whatever is considered polite in Japan…
Not having a room for the night thanks to a racist ryokan with the last available room in all of the Sasebo area (yes, I’m playing the racist card here – politically correct or not! Unless you lived in Japan for a while you have no idea how xenophobic Japanese people can be. If you are polite in English and racist in Japanese about 6 billion people worldwide won’t understand what you are saying…) I decided to cut my exploration plans from 4 days to 3 days by skipping Ikeshima. So I went back to Hakata Station in Fukuoka, the most populous city in Kyushu. The tourist information centre there was way less helpful and didn’t even try. No rooms in Fukuoka, probably nowhere in Northern Kyushu. That’s what they told me and ended the conversation. So I decided to go back home – after getting up at 4.40 in the morning, standing in crowded JR trains for more than 4 hours (on the way down to Kyushu alone!) and spending around 35.000 Yen on train tickets I learned the hard way how much Golden Week sucks, especially if you dare to try it the oh so hated spontaneous way… and that there are no available hotel rooms in Northern Kyushu, at least not if you are a foreigner in Japan; which really, really disappointed me as I love Japan. Otherwise I wouldn’t go into my seventh year of living here soon…

1.) No escape
You can’t escape Golden Week. Even if you are smart enough to stay at home and not to go on spontaneous trips. Well, maybe if you live in some mountain village you won’t be affected, but I’m sure they have special Golden Week shows on TV, too. But everybody else is affected negatively by Golden Week in one way or the other. Especially smaller businesses close during Golden Week, which means that the neighbourhood bakery is most likely closed. So are mom and dad restaurants if you need a decent meal during lunch break; same goes for the local waterhole. Supermarkets most likely close earlier or even completely. If you wanna go anywhere on the weekends involving Golden Week those places will most likely be busier. You just can’t escape it…

Sure, Japan is a rich country and in the end all those things are only minor annoyances to be filed under “First World Problems”, not tragedies of epic proportions; but they are nevertheless annoyances that make the term Golden Week rather misleading. I remember a colleague once telling me in a different context that “you can’t polish shit”. Well, I guess in Japan(ese) you can – and the turd of this golden calf is called Golden Week!

Yamaguchi New Zealand Village

When you think of Japan which other country comes to mind?
Probably Korea since it’s a neighboring country and both countries share an inglorious common history. China, of course, a major influence for centuries – from city planning to food. Most likely the United States as no other country had more impacted on Japan in the past 70 years. Maybe Germany due to 150 years of more or less intense friendship and a similar post-war history.
Japan and New Zealand? A rather odd combination. Surprisingly *Michael* and I visited not only one, but two New Zealand themed amusement parks while on a *road trip in southern Honshu*. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the *Hiroshima New Zealand Farm*, a closed but not abandoned theme park in Hiroshima prefecture. This time I’ll present you the clearly abandoned Yamaguchi New Zealand Village – same concept, same company, but without the shadow of a doubt a “lost place”; BTW: I really dislike the term Lost Place, which is used for urban exploration locations in Germany – not as bad “Handy”, which is used for mobile phones (!), but nevertheless a term that makes me cringe.

Arriving at the huge deserted parking lot of the New Zealand Village it was pretty clear that we wouldn’t run into gardeners or other caretakers. The wooden handrail leading up to the entrance area was getting brittle and all kinds of plants grew without any attempt to tame them. Opened in July of 1990 after spending 1.8 billion Yen (currently about 16.5 million Euros or 21.7 million Dollars) the park’s attendance figures peaked in 1991 at 428.000 – in the following years the numbers dropped to about one third of that per annum before Farm Co. Ltd. put an end to it in 2005 by closing the park. Initially the 30 ha (300,000 m²) large New Zealand Village was put on hiatus for up to three years with the intent of re-opening it again one day, but that never happened. I don’t know if somebody took take of it for a while like they do at the New Zealand Farm (which is in its fourth year of closing), but nowadays the New Zealand Village is clearly abandoned…
(Just for comparison: *Nara Dreamland* peaked at 1.6 million visitors a year and closed when the number was as low as 400.000 – Universal Studios Japan in Osaka welcomes about 8 million guests a year.)

Exploring the New Zealand Village couldn’t have been more relaxed. Located in the middle of nowhere Michael and I enjoyed a wonderful sunny day on the copious premises.
The entrance area was dominated by a gift shop called カンタベリー (Canterbury), vandalized, but still stocked with quite a few examples of fake food Japan is so famous for – in this case all kinds of sweets. We found replicas of mini cakes, both Western and Japanese (mochi), all made of plastic and therefore still nice to look at.
In close proximity was the Jersey Factory that produced and sold homemade bronzer… sorry… handmade butter! And pretty much next to this place with a name that has no connection to New Zealand was a huge building that had New Zealand all over the place: Restaurant Rotorua, Newzealand Farm, Kiwi Country. Why give it one name when you can give it three? Or four, since all to the left it said “Main Bazaar”.

This food dominated commercial zone of the New Zealand Village, which overall had way less of a village feeling than the New Zealand Farm, was followed by the wide, open landscape I knew from other versions of the nature themed parks. And I loved it! I usually don’t feel very comfortable in abandoned buildings, but open areas like mining towns and amusement parks I really enjoy (if they are really abandoned), especially on sunny spring days!

What made the New Zealand Village in Yamaguchi different from those in Hiroshima and Shikoku was the variety of strange pedal-powered vehicles. Cars, bikes and really strange construction – they were scattered all over the park, a plethora of rental… thingies. I took photos of many of them and maybe one day in the future I will publish a special picture set about them.
Another thing that made this installment of the New Zealand parks special (but not in a good way!) was the already mentioned presence of vandalism. It wasn’t “ZOMGWTFBBQ!?” bad, but since vandalism is always uncalled for it was nevertheless sad to see. Call me old-fashioned and naïve, but I like my abandoned places easy to access and naturally decayed. Luckily the amount of vandalism decreased the further we got away from the entrance, so by the time we reached the stables and Sheep House with its museum of 19^th century item and a couple of taxidermy items in the making vandalism was nothing but a bad memory.

What really bugged me about exploring the Yamaguchi New Zealand Village was the time pressure. Like I already mentioned, this was part of a road trip to the south of Honshu and the schedule was kind of tight. A place like this deserves a whole day of exploring and taking pictures, probably with some hours after sunset for some special photos – a luxury not available to us. So when Michael and I left after 3 hours (which is generous for most places – *Sekigahara Menard Land* I left after about 20 minutes…) it was with a bittersweet aftertaste, amplified by a bunch of beatniks who entered the parking lots just before we left. Us driving away was accompanied by the sound of burnouts in the distance…

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Moriyama Auto Camp / Mount Noro Speed Park

Expectations are one of the worst things in life. Especially when they are as high as mine were driving up to the top of Mount Noro in Hiroshima prefecture. What did I expect? A speedway abandoned in 1974 and a shuttered amusement park, also left behind in 1974. I didn’t see any photos in advance, but I read a slightly cryptical Japanese description and the satellite view on GoogleMaps was very promising. Sadly the location didn’t live up to the expectations, so *Michael* and I were about to face the first disappointment of our *road trip to southern Honshu*… which wasn’t as bad in retrospect.

Mount Noro (insert stupid joke about the Noro virus in Japan here) near Hiroshima is one of the city’s most popular recreational areas for hikers, mountain climbers, campers and flower lovers. It’s said that it offers a stunning view at both sunrise and sunset. Aside from the fact that Michael and I were way to too late for the first and way too early for the second we wouldn’t have been able to see either anyways – the 839 meters high mountain was covered by low hanging clouds from about its second half. Occasionally the visibility was only a couple of meters and it looked more like rain than clearing up. When we reached the entrance of what I hoped would be the abandoned Mount Noro Speed Park (a.k.a. Mount Noro Circuit) at an elevation of 830 meters (Japanese people like their race tracks high above sea level as we know from the *Hiroshima Kart Pista*) we realized that the place was reused at least once since we were welcomed by signs telling us that we found the Moriyama Auto Camp. Close, but no cigar…

It turned out that this location has quite a history. A history I only found out about after we visited the place – like I mentioned earlier: Before our visit I had only vague information about a racetrack and an amusement park. The Mount Noro Amusement Park was a typical mid-size theme park of the 60s with a couple of merry-go-rounds and a rollercoaster, and it opened in April of 1968. In close proximity the Mount Noro Speed Park followed with an opening ceremony in October 1969. The intent was to make Mount Noro more attractive for tourists. As we all know: Those hiking eco freaks that headed for the mountain until then weren’t spending much money while amusement parks were THE cash cows of 1960s Japan, where the tired workers of the East Asian Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) were looking to spend their hard earned bucks. Sadly the business people behind the big tourist plans didn’t expect two things to happen: The traditional nature lovers complained about the dramatically increased noise level on Mount Noro – and in 1973 / 1974 an oil crisis hit the world. The combination of those events forced both the amusement park as well as the speedway to close their doors for good in 1974. Which was incredibly sad in the case of the 932 meters long and technically quite demanding Mount Noro Speed Park as it was quickly used for races of national fame, including the “All Japan 200km Stock Car Race” which was held annually from May 1970 on.

Sad for Michael and I was the fact that the weather was bad and that the race track was in such horrible state we weren’t even sure we found the right place – especially with those Moriyama Auto Camp signs at the entrance. We entered the place (adults 500 Yen, children 200 Yen, cars 3500 Yen…) and were quite a bit confused about the routing along the slope, which seemed rather unusual for a speedway. And the empty pond with the garbage cans also didn’t really fit in. Down the road we reached a bifurcation – left: Moriyama Auto Camp; right: Moriyama Auto Camp. Well, that didn’t help much…

We continued to the left only to find a huge abandoned trailer advertising Fukutome Ham, the inside filled with some seats (no meats…), garbage and a seriously damaged suzumebachi nest. For those not aware of this danger for all urban explorers and hikers: suzumebachi are also know as Asian Giant Hornets (Vespa mandarinia), aggressive nasty beasts with a body length of 5 cm and a sting that injects large amounts of potent poison, potentially deadly for both other animals and humans.

We continued up the mountain along the seriously damaged asphalt road only to find half demolished bath rooms at what once was the pit lane of the speedway. The surrounding building was gone, making all the faucets, toilets and showers open air installations. 300 Yen for 5 minutes was written on the shower doors, the curtains behind moldy and nasty.

Further down the pit lane, a bit above the race track, we found a two-storey building. The lower floor once housed a restaurant and I guess it dated back to the speedway days. The upper floor once was the home of somebody. Quite an unspectacular house with the usual remains of an abandoned building.

On the way back to our car we saw a camping trailer next to the former race track. It looked way more modern than anything else on the premises, so I kept a safe distance while Michael had a closer look. Through the window he saw a calendar from 2012 and a working clock, so we wondered why somebody would rather live in a trailer than in the furnished room in the building three minutes away – and decided to leave as none of us were eager to ask the person who made this choice.

Right at the entrance we had a closer look at the attendant’s hut with the charming painting. I guess the previously mentioned empty pond once was an attraction of the Moriyama Auto Camp – rainbow trout fishing. The hut also revealed that the now abandoned area had a size of 71000 m² and once offered 40 campfire places – just not right before it closed as this information was blacked out on the flyer. Reason for the leaflet was the opening of the place on July 1st of an undisclosed year. Leaving the hut my eyes caught one final item, the flyer of a Bihoku Auto Village, announcing its grand opening on June 26th 1999. I was confused. Same place, again a different name? Luckily not as it turned out later – just the flyer of a similar place elsewhere in Hiroshima prefecture… (And still in business!)

I never went camping in Japan and obviously I was disappointed that the expected abandoned race track turned out to be a converted one, but the rainy / foggy weather was a blessing in disguise. Walking along the seriously damaged speedway with that kind of weather created quite an eerie atmosphere I actually enjoyed more in retrospect than I was aware of at the time. But it took quite some effort to find out about and get to the Mount Noro Speed Park / Moriyama Auto Camp as to my knowledge it hasn’t appeared on any other urbex / haikyo blog yet… Would I spend that much time on it again? Probably not. Do I regret having it done? Definitely not! I especially enjoy exploring new kinds of abandoned locations, especially if they are in the middle of nowhere. And in that regard this haikyo was a great success – I’d always prefer my first abandoned auto camp over the 20th abandoned hotel!

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Ganne Fortress

Usually I don’t explore military ruins that were turned into tourist attractions. I went to Tomogashima off the coast of Wakayama about two years ago and deemed it so unspectacular that I haven’t even written about it yet. In Kanto a lot of urban explorers visit Sarushima (Monkey Island, like the game) in Tokyo Bay and write about it on their blogs. To me it doesn’t feel right. Those places are 100, 150 year old tourist attractions. Gutted and polished. With gardeners. Maybe it’s because I grew up in an area of Germany where you can hardly throw a stone without hitting a castle ruin. And no Greek would call the acropolis an abandoned place. Because those places aren’t. They are old buildings attracting tourists. Historical ruins, not modern ruins.

The Ganne Fortress on the other hand WAS a historical ruin that attracted tourists. After it was left behind by the Japanese military it was abandoned again as a tourist attraction and became a modern ruin. The peninsula housing the Ganne Fortress was of strategic importance for centuries to guard the sea route to Hiroshima. The current fortification was built in 1898 and retired in 1919 without having seen any action. It was equipped with four 270 millimeter canons as well as four 50 millimeter light artillery guns, supplied by four powder storages. In 1997 the Ganne Fortress was fixed up along with a couple of similar installations to create the Fortress Forest Park, teaching tourists and locals about the military history of that area. In 2004 the area experienced a major reorganization with cities merged and stuff like that, so I guess the new people in charge lost interest. Especially since they were now taking care of a real naval history museum, too. A small fortress on top of a mountain really off the beaten track with a rather steep narrow road that can become dangerously slippery leading to it? Nobody wants to be responsible for that!

While nature generally seems to do a pretty good job reclaiming territory given up by mankind it is especially fast in Japan. Just a couple of years after the Ganne Fortress was abandoned the whole thing is pretty much overgrown. The asphalt road leading to the installations is covered by needles and broken branches, trees are starting to reach over. Concrete handrails looking like wood are losing their color and cracking up, revealing their stone and metal innards. Smaller stairs, once used as shortcuts to the top and to reach one of the already mentioned former powder storages, are pretty much completely overgrown now, making it tough even in very early spring to pass through. The stainless steel chains, a decade ago preventing tourists from falling to their deaths, lost their purpose, but they are still flashing in the sunlight. Halfway up the mountain, in anonther one of the old powder storages, was a little museum – now completely smashed to pieces and hard to reach due to two other sets of overgrown stairs. The mountain top still offers a gorgeous view, although the uncontrolled growth of nature sometimes makes it hard to get a good look. Or to take interesting photos. The two short videos I took turned out to be so dull that I won’t even publish them.

My fellow explorer *Michael* didn’t seem to be impressed either so we called it a day pretty quickly and got *back on the road* again…

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