Anyway, this final part is, as the title says, one lonely house I spotted besides a branch off from 303.

After spotting the site from a distance a quick check of the exterior quickly confirmed it’s haikyo status. The sliding doors at the front were unlocked and the kitchen door was just gaping open, in short you could have asked for a more inviting site.

I always enjoy small domestic haikyo because of all the personal details that you can find, and this one delivered as soon as you walked through the door. The tatami floor, of a room which had obviously been raided by deer several times, was scattered with faded photos of children spilt from an old tin box. I can’t really say why, but I just loved the bleached and blurred edged the water damage had dealt these pictures.

The bright lit kitchen opened onto a much darker pair of back rooms, a living room (piled with futons) and a larger (empty) tatami room.

By far my favourite feature of these back rooms was the wardrobe, with its door open and a single, simple, white dress hanging inside – beautiful.

A narrow flight of stairs at the far end of the living room led up to a loft, however one part of this space bad been boxed off to create a small makeshift bedroom; which, going by the evidence of school book and old posters, had been a kids room. I must have been quite strange to have such a boxy little room, only separated from the loft by a flimsy partition.

  Beyond that I really can’t tell you anything about the story of this place – but as Neil Gaimen once observed it’s the mystery not the answer that survives, so maybe not knowing anything is better anyway.

I really did like this funny, lonely little house though and actually went back again after my initial winter visit (so those photos were compiled over two visits).

It was nice to see the same place both covered in snow and surrounded by green grass; the ability to re-visit is a big advantage of local haikyo and enjoy these seasonal variations.

To date that’s the extent of my discoveries on route 303 having covered the whole section in reasonable cycling distance from my flat.

I still have another 6 or 7 haikyo trips to write-up, and though I will try to do it sooner rather than later I may well slip.

At the moment I don’t only have my life, my wife and my work (as usual), but also I’m spending most of my free time studying for a big Japanese language test in December right now.

So wish me luck with that, and I promise I haven’t abandoned this blog!

Oh – there’s also an album online now. A big collection of pictures from all three 303 reports. You can check that out at the link below -

Route 303 photo album

Enjoy!

Changes are like dominoes.

A shift in economics can force a change of lifestyle that drives people to the cities and clears out whole villages. Building a new major road can leave old byways crumbling and forgotten (which was basically the plot of Pixar’s Cars). Evidence of both of these phenomena can be seen along Route 303 with almost abandoned villages in the woods off to the side, and forgotten winding roads that haven’t been used since more direct tunnels were driven through the hills,

Here is a good example of the tunnel effect, just to the right of the mouth of this tunnel the original road is now blocked off with a white barrier.

Crossing the barrier and rounding the corner the scene ahead looks almost post apocalyptic with trashed cars, a crumbling  bridge and animal bones scattered on the ground. Not far after the whole road had collapsed into the river below leaving an unpassable gap.

Not much further along the route another small side road branched off , curving around a small field and sliding off into the woods. That might not have caught my attention if it wasn’t for the fact that there was a very tempting, and crumbling, building standing in the middle of the field.

A quick look around the outside and I decided it was more a farming hut than a house, but it still seemed worth investigation. So I took a peek inside, apparently I wasn’t the first to take a look inside however – the floor being littered with deer droppings. Since it’s dereliction this place has obviously become a bit of a shelter for the local deer.

The lower floor was basically a small porch and one room scattered with agricultural tools, a few home comforts such as this nice old kettle and a rather incongruous decorative samurai helmet sitting on a little.

Upstairs there was another single room that looked like it had been used mostly as storage space. Boxes, chests and a couple of really nice wooden cabinets were all piled up along with a few decorative panels and an impressively sized portrait.

Encouraged by this find I decided to follow this side road further and after distance cycling I was rewarded with a small, dead, village, dotted with haikyo.

Judging  by the lack of track in the snow piled up around the area many of the buildings hadn’t been entered for a while, but I limited my exploration to the few building that were really gaping open and falling to bits.

It’s quite possible that I could have got into several other building there with bit of effort, but there was a risk that I’d have stumbled into someones summer cottage rather than a haikyo. So I decided it was best to leave the other less certain places well alone and head back home. I ventured down just one more little side route on my way back, but that yielded nothing but snowdrifts and a dead deer.

I still couldn’t help feeling that there was more to be uncovered around this area, so I resolved to head back out again and explore this route a little more in the near future….

The first place that caught my eye and got me out there, was this road side diner – which I have to admit turned out to be a pretty dull shell of a building, but it did at least get me out and exploring the area.

There really was nothing inside the diner, just bare empty rooms with nothing to justify anything beyond the briefest of stops.

What I’d thought was a house standing next to it turned out to be just as disappointing, the roof having long since collapsed leaving what remained open to the elements and oddly inaccessible at the same time.

Fortunately, just a little further down the road was a more promising batch of buildings.

The building on the far right was locked tight with no way in, and to the left much of the row consisted of empty rusted garage space – but the last building on the left was open reasonably intact.

At first glance it seemed pretty bare too, but tucked away on the ground floor was one small room with a piano, and a desk cluttered with what seemed to be things that had suggested it had once belonged to a young woman.There was also a collapsing kitchen that still showed traces of the previous inhabitants.

Encouraged by this I decided it would be worth checking up stairs too.

The sheer amount of stuff left all piled up and strewn around upstairs (in contrast to the stripped down lower floor) was quite shocking. Here was a living room and a bed room just packed with personal touches.

For my money, it’s the once lived in haikyo that throw up the most interesting finds, and I can quite happily pass my time rummaging through the boxes and drawers in rooms like this… so that’s what I did! I dug up a lot of little oddities, but one of the most impressive finds was the big collection of ‘Hikaru Genji’ albums that they had stashed away (in some cases more than one copy of the same album).

Just the covers of these album were almost enough to crush me under the weight of their sheer awesomeness – ‘Hello – I love you’ (a great album title and a great chat up line too; especially if you take the fashion tip off the same cover and wear a red cowboy hat when you say it!) Well, I know you’re all just dieing to sample some of their Japanese disco goodness – so here a youtube link to a clip with music from the album on the top right of the picture… oh, and if you haven’t been tempted yet, these boys can roller skate too!

.

This time I’ll leave you with another favorite haikyo find of mine – old family pictures.

I don’t know what it is about found picture, but they interest me far more than they would if someone tried to show me the same pictures over tea in their comfortable house. I guess it’s the not knowing, the freedom to conjecture and speculate over who these people are (or were) and what it was that became of them – and some of these are great pictures! I think my favorite is the Homelite chainsaw company shot, there’s something so odd about the formal poses and the casually waiting chainsaws in front of them (there were chainsaw posters on the wall downstairs too).

In the end this strange roadside ruin turned out to be a much richer find than it’s exterior suggested it might be, and it got me wondering what else 303 had to offer. Join me next time for part two – featuring forgotten roads and a lost village.

I promised a follow up a long time ago when I was about to depart on a quest to try and track down a mummified Kappa in Osaka. So that’s where we’ll pick up today.

So the reason I didn’t do the follow up sooner was that my attempts to get to see the Kappa mummy in Osaka were rebuffed by the owners of the temple. However, here are some pictures of supposed Kappa mummies from around the world.

Firstly, the one I wanted to see.

Secondly, one from the National of Ethnology in the Netherlands.

Lastly, one from Imari in Saga, Japan.

All three images come from this article over at Pink Tentacle. Not many updates recently but there are some wonderful articles in the archive if you dig around a bit (just type ‘yokai’ into the search box). For example – Click here for a great article on Edo period Kappa woodblock prints – like these!

And anybody who is willing to do some serious reading on the topic can check out this very detailed write up of all things Kappa at onmarkproductions.com. As well as almost every aspect of Kappa mythology (and possible fact) it’s packed with cool illustrations and photos too. For example, this one of a fisherman using his butt as bait to go fishing for a Kappa -

In case you’re wondering why this would tempt a Kappa, well the answer is that Kappa crave ‘shirikodama’, which literally translates as something like ‘anus ball’. This mythical ball is believe to be removed from a victim’s anus by the Kappa, and this is what causes them to drown (not all that water in the lungs as you may have thought). This belief may have come about due to the fact that many drowning victims have a distended, or open, anus – as if something was removed.

Anyway, this video touches on the subject, though calling the balls by the more delicate name of ‘spirit balls’ – this is just one of a series of videos on ‘How to raise a Kappa’, but it’s the only one I could find with English subtitles.

And if that whet your appetite more Kappas on film, check this out  -

Well the title says it all really, it’s a movie about a giant killer Kappa. What this film tries to do is to re imagine the humble Kappa as a kaiju (a giant monster, in the vein of Godzilla). Now, I haven’t actually bothered to watch this whole movie myself. Its 4/10 imdb rating, and this trailer, were enough for me. However, the trailer is amusing, and it’s good to see that the Kappa’s traditional love of wrestling is present and correct in his fighting style.

Although not so Kappa-centric, there are other yokai movie (featuring Kappa) far more worthy of your time. Most notably the Yokai Monsters series which consists of 3 classic titles, from 1968-69, and a worthy modern entry made in 2005. Check out the imdb links below -

Yokai Monsters – 100 Monsters

Yokai Monsters – Spook Warfare

Yokai Monsters – Along With The Ghosts

(Trailer link)

The Great Yokai War

The whole site spreads along the side of the valley that hides it from the main road, yet despite the secluded location though there were a surprising number of people milling around nearby thanks to a popular water spring just across the road where people were filling up water bottles. At first this made us a little nervous about heading into the site, but after a bit of hanging around observing we noticed a couple of other people slipping in and out – following their lead we soon found what seemed to be a small pumping station with a convenient ladder leaning against an outside wall.

One quick scramble later we were in.

The labyrinthine nature of the place soon became apparent with various paths, gangways and flights of stairs leading off in all directions.

Not wanting to be too visible we headed straight for the interior and the cover of the buildings. The first thing we really explored was a series of wooden buildings where the raw stone must have been processed into a powdered form judging by the white dust coating everything.

The interiors were an almost uniform pristine white from the build up of  ‘lime’ that caked everything, it all looked so stark and strangely beautiful. It’s no surprise that this area was chosen for the cover picture of ‘the book’.

Leaving the white wonderland behind and climbing higher among the buildings we passed between two huge workshops and came to a kind of cross-roads. On one side we had the buildings we’d just passed between and a path leading beyond them up the hillside, on the other side a kind of paved road led down between wooden buildings.

Deciding to carry on up the hill we doubled back through the workshops and walked straight into the middle of a firefight. A group of young Japanese guys were using this area for some pellet powered war games, and I can’t fault them on that it was a perfect location.

After a brief cat* with the war gamers (and a photo-op) we begin to explore the building in more detail, discovering steps leading up to a second and third floor.

(* Or a brief  ‘chat’ even; no cats were harmed during the writing of this blog!)

From the top floor our next objective is clearly pointed out for us, and we’re quickly realising there’s not going to be enough time to cover the whole site today with all these buildings ahead and this being just one part of the site.

We eventually exit out the back of the building, back on track and heading up the hillside via a winding path past rusted gas tanks. After a short walk we come out at a spot looking back at the place we’d just come from beautifully framed by a huge pipe section.

Smaller and more derelict buildings line the path now, with hoppers and conveyor belts crisscrossing inside and overhead. Somewhere ahead the raw materials were being processed and this is the route they were brought down to be crushed with metal gears and grinding wheels.

Finally we reach the end of the line, beyond all the buildings, up by the quarry face and by the tunnel entrances, we can look back across the valley and the site laid out below. A lot of what we can see from here was by-passed on the way up, and beyond where we started there’s still so much more unexplored ground, but already we’re beginning to lose light and it’s time to start heading back down.

Still we can’t resist exploring some of the places we missed on the way up. So, checking out a few of the smaller (less industrial) looking buildings, we soon find a few rooms that seem more set up for research purposes. There’s a distinct ‘lab’ like feel to some of these rooms with tubes, beakers, measuring devices and jars full of mineral samples strewn around.

This last room had boxes and boxes of core samples drilled out of the rock, enough to make any amateur geologist go weak at the knees (probably).

Back down the steps and tunnels to the ladder, down through the pumping station and back to the car. Despite being here several hours we’ve seen less than half the site and half-formed plans for a return trip are already bubbling away. Would another access point from the other end of the complex be possible?

Determined to find out we scout out the road that should lead down directly to the main entrance gate and take a stroll along it. Sure enough the side of the road is littered with collapsed wooden huts and eventually we come out by the main gate, complete with the old security check point still there.

Oddly the main gate looks well-preserved and has an apparently working alarm system attached to it. I say oddly considering how redundant it seems, I have never seen so many people inside a haikyo before (as well as the war gamers there was also another explorer and a couple taking cosplay pictures).  Also there seemed to be so little there worth protecting, though I guess that if you could drive a big truck in you could salvage quite a lot of reasonably valuable scrap and that’s probably what they are trying to stop.

Anyway, not far from this site there is supposed to be the remains of the power station that provided most of the energy for this place. We don’t have the time to track that down today, but a double bill trip to see the power plant and re-visit this site may well be in order one day.

For my next haikyo trip though I was back to exploring the area around where I live by bike and turning up a lot more than I ever expected to find.

UPDATE: I just added a big gallery of pictures from this trip that can be seen here.

I had the good fortune to be able to stop by the Doctor Who Experience in London while I was passing through and snap a few pictures of the classic costumes and creatures on display there.

The ‘experience’ is divided into two parts a mini-adventure guided by the current Doctor (Matt Smith) via a series of special video appearances. Apparently he’s gone and got himself locked in another Pandorica (‘They had a spare.’ he laments), so it’s up to us to save him, by running around lots of corridors and themed rooms such as – an intergalactic museum, TARDIS interior, a dalek mother ship and so on. The climax of this is donning 3D specs for a trip down the time vortex with daleks, cybermen and stone angels all trying to kill you – and this isn’t subtle depth of field 3D, this is ‘Let’s make stuff stick as far out of the screen as possible’ 3D. (Sorry, I couldn’t take pictures of this part)

The second part is the photography friendly (but dimly lit) exhibition, part of which you can see here. Enjoy!

Firstly, the costumes of all the actors to have (officially) played the character since the show started in 1963.

(Left to Right: William Harnell 1963-1966, Patrick Troughton 1966-1969, Jon Pertwee 1970-1974, Tom Baker 1974-1981, Peter Davison 1981-1984)

(Colin Baker 1984-1986, Sylvester McCoy 1987-1989 & 1996, Paul McGann 1996, Christopher Eccleston 2005, David Tennant 2005-2010)

(and, with the TARDIS, Matt Smith 2010 – ongoing)

Being born in 1974 my Doctor is Tom Baker, but I’ve gone back and watched earlier episodes with all the previous incarnations (I’m currently watching some old Pertwee serials) and I still enjoy the show today. In fact I love what Matt Smith is bringing to the character and really rate him as the Doctor. I hope he stays with the show for a few more years.

Next up a couple of TARDIS control rooms and few sonic screwdrivers.

A small selection of companions costumes (almost exclusively post-2005).

Then on to the scary stuff with a few classic series monsters.

Though there were far more post-2005 creatures than classics.

Of course some of the more famous Doctor Who creations have been a constant in both classic and new Who. Such as the Sontarans, …

or Davros and the Daleks.

Perhaps the best indication of how the show has evolved though is this brief history of the Cyber-men.

2013 will mark the 50th anniversary of the show, and I’m sure that current show runner Steven Moffat will have something wonderful in store for us then, but right now I’m just eager for September to arrive and the six episodes that will conclude this year’s series. It’s going to be great – trust me!

This is a small collection of three random costume sightings scored during other trips.

Firstly during a day out at the Meji Muru in Inuyama, I ran into this clawed cutie. A girl in white knee-length boots and a pink crab costume – don’t ask why.

She was actually with a small camera crew so a guess they were about to record a TV segment. The building in the background is a Frank Lloyd Wright original, so maybe it was something to do with that.

Anyway, here is ‘Crab Girl’ on her own.

Number two is also a sneak preview of the next haikyo on my ‘To blog’ list.

I’d heard stories of people running into Cosplayers doing photo shoots whilst out exploring haikyo, but this is the first time it happened to me.

Part way through exploring a huge Limestone processing plant we spotted this photographer and model doing a shoot in the distance.

By the time we’d wandered over to the area they were shooting in they were finishing up and leaving, we exchanged hellos and passed each other by…. BUT a few weeks later, we ran into exactly the same photographer with a different model at a derelict mine site.

I snapped a couple of pics from a discreet distance during their photoshoot.

But, preferring to be up front and direct about these things I went up, introduced myself and got a couple of better shots to boot.

Full reports on these haikyo will be appearing in future updates.

As we draw close to the area that we figure it has to be in a huge black brick chimney slides into view above the other buildings. Brick isn’t a typical material in Japan (its dead weight isn’t something you want falling on you during an earthquake) and seeing brick usually suggests a historical or foreign (influenced) building – often both. Guessing that this must be what we’re here to see we park up and make our way across a rather industrial looking bridge and weir combo so see exactly what it is we’ve found.

On the other side of the bridge there are three brick building that despite being in near ruins look like somebody has taken an interest in them. The chimney seems restored and is tethered in place with suspension cables, and two of the buildings have been fenced off in a way that leaves them open for viewing, but inaccessible for exploration.

Not that what you can see suggests there’d be much to explore, just walls without a roof and the remins of some heavy machinery.

The most interesting building though is the one with the chimney sticking out of it, a long, low, all brick structure with an arched tunnel running almost all the way around the outside edge.

As regular intervals little fireplace like alcoves lead off into the interior (which could probably be accessed with bit of claustrophobic crawling which I didn’t try). This place had obviously been a huge kiln of some kind, and judging by the building material I’d guess brick, though it could have been ceramic as well.

The tunnels are quite short, but easy to access and quite atmospheric. Despite pieces of board leaning over the entrances, no huge effort seems to have been made to keep anybody out, and the way it’s obviously been marked (and preserved) as a site of historical interest makes this (along with Minetopia) a very ‘tourist friendly’ site that I’d recommend to anybody with a casual interest in haikyo or industrial history.

So that’s that. A short, sweet, and undemading exploration… that was just the morning though.

That afternoon we drove over to a huge Limestone mine and processing plant (#108, p.156) which will be written up in the next haikyo report.

Anybody who uses ‘ The Book ‘ might recognise this picture from p.199.

I even cropped my picture to look as close to the book version as possible, consider this my homage.

Though I have no idea why they selected this image to represent what is in fact a rather wonderful six storey hotel, with an elevated sky tower so tall you can see it long before the hotel comes into view.

This isn’t even the best bit of graffiti in the building, which has been adopted as a canvas by the graffiti community and is full much grander pieces of art, but we’ll get to that later.

First, let’s put this place into a bit of context.

The Rainbow Hotel, overlooking the inland sea between Honshu and Shikoku, had obviously been quite a place in its day. It was only later in the day, from a rollercoaster in a theme park on the hill behind the hotel, that I was able to get a shot of the whole hotel, its sky tower and its coastal setting.

Maybe doesn’t look much now, but according to some promotional photos we found in one of the corridors it had been lit up like Vegas back when it was open. The illuminated UFO-style observation platform rising and lowering must have been a sight to have seen.

Our point of entry brings us directly to the bottom of the sky tower and almost the first thing we see is 360 degree panorama of graffiti all around the base of th tower.

Most of these pieces are ‘tags’ declaring which artist was here, but it’s in a different league from the ‘Dave woz ere’ style graffiti you might get elsewhere, and not all the pieces were just tags either.

The Sky Tower sure looked different from this angle as well.

Keeping out of the main hotel we climbed the Sky Tower ring until eventually we were able to get into the UFO itself, though it turned out to be quite narrow, cramped and not as exciting as expected.

After the tower we made our way down to what would have been the main access from the car park into the hotel, which would have made an excellent paint ball arena with its devastated battlefield aesthetic.

In fact this was quite typical of most of the larger open areas inside the hotel. Generally they were stripped down, bare and exposed. Take for example these concourses, the reception area, the hotel bar, kitchens and spa pool.

In fact without the graffiti some areas would have seemed very barren here. There are some who are strongly opposed to graffiti in haikyo, and in some regards I agree, but there were some really interesting pieces scattered around the Rainbow Hotel that were arguably the most interesting features of the place. (Remember the tag on the top left of this next collage – it’ll be significant later!)

Another aspect of the hotel I really liked was the light in the corridors between the rooms, patchwork shadow and light alternating between solid wall and open doors. The dappled effect was really nice and provided some good angles with strong foregrounds and spaces opening and unfolding behind.

In fact these angles provided some great compositional opportunities which had been really well exploited by some of the better graffiti artists, sometimes a really good piece would be perfectly framed by the very structure of the hotel itself. So here’s my top 5 instant compositions offered up by the Rainbow Hotel (no specific order).

In these first two the artist used a huge facing wall at the head of a long corridor to good effect.

As you can see above, another nice effect is when the artist uses the pool of light at the end of the corridor to frame their piece. Here’s another nice example of that in action.

I’m not sure that these last two were as intentional as the others, but I really liked the way that the graffiti had created a kind of bracket frame around this old safe sitting on a tatami floor.

Lastly, I got a kick out of how from a certain angle the mouse (promoting a local theme park) and the graffiti kid (throwing a nazi salute) on the wall behind seemed strikingly similar in their poses.

Once we’d checked out all the rooms, many of which were just empty and a few of which were fire damaged, we began to head back down – but as we approached our exit we head something, we weren’t alone. Sneaking over to towards the sounds we spotted one of the artists just getting to work.

I snapped this photo and then decided to go down and introduce myself, which was funny, the guy was very on edge for a moment – I guess he thought he’d been busted but had no idea why it was two gaijin guys. Anyway, I quickly explained that we were just haikyo enthusiasts and that we liked the graffiti, he relaxed and we asked him about his work – remember the tag I said you should remember? No – well go back and check, as it turns out it was this guys work. I asked if it was ok to take a picture of him at work and he said he didn’t want his face shown (hence the black spot above), so I just took a leg shot of him with the can in hand.

He then asked if I wanted to help out with his latest piece. Hmmm – not really, but it sounds like a good photo-op, so this is my ‘Bill Clinton’ graffiti moment – I was holding the can, but I didn’t spray!

These random encounters that you can have with people in haikyo can be real fun, in addition to this guy we’ve recently run into a group of war games with pellet guns and the same cos-play photographer in two different places. I’ll put up the cos-play pictures in my next post, but that’s all for today. Andrew is on his way over now and we’re off to find a haikyo village I got told about recently – so if we find it that’s something to look forward to in a future post.

For now -

Click here for a fuller gallery of photos.