Haikyo #1: Pachinko Parlor

*Warning: entering abandoned areas can be dangerous. Please be wary of squatters, unstable structures, and hazardous materials. ALWAYS have your phone, and if you are alone, make sure someone knows what area you are in*

A favorite hobby of mine, ever since childhood, has been exploring abandoned places. Something about going through forgotten places has always filled me with a sense of curiosity and wonder. I think it is because I know that I am walking through a discarded piece of the past, a slice of history simply left to rot.

The biggest thing that still strikes me, even after doing this dozens of times, is what people decide to leave behind. Sometimes there's barely anything, the place is merely a shell, but other times, I quite honestly cannot believe what was forgotten. From simple things like clothes and toys, to things that I would never think to leave, like negatives from your wedding day.

Every time that I enter an abandoned place, which in Japan is called a Haikyo (廃墟), I find myself wondering what happened here? What lead this place to becoming forgotten? Because of this, my favorite part of exploring these ruins is trying to find clues as to who the people behind it were and what happened, and I hope that through my photos and stories, I can distill that feeling in a few of you as well. 

So without further ado, here is my first of hopefully many haikyo entries.

For my first entry I am going to start with a small exploration, a closed pachinko parlor. 

I noticed this particular place during my routine drives down Rt 49 from Iwaki to Koriyama, every time I drove by, I wanted to check it out, but every time it somehow happened to be raining. 
  
This place consists of 3 buildings, the pachinko parlor, managers house and a combo kitchen / apartment. 

The pachinko parlor

 

The kitchen/workshop and apartment

I began my exploration by, fittingly enough, walking through the houses front door.

The indoor shoes were still waiting patiently for their owners to return and use them again.

The house appeared to be a pretty nice home, but completely empty of important belongings. So I quickly moved onwards to the connecting pachinko lounge.

Believe it or not, I have lived in Japan for 2.5 years, but this was my first time stepping into one of these places...

Everything seemed pretty run of the mill when it comes to haikyos, until I came to the other side of the gaming center and was confronted with a scene I was not too happy to see. A squatter had been here.

And he likes Hello Kitty

I checked the piles of cans lying around, and everything was long expired, so I figured I was safe, but sped up my time in this building just to be safe. You never know what kind of person could be in one of these places, and it is something I try to never discover firsthand.

The last thing that really struck me while going through the parlor was the many dead birds, I spent a long time searching for any opening to help keep it from happening again, but to no avail.

In the next building, I found that this location had also been home to a small restaurant.

It became clear very quickly that whomever had been doing their laundry in the parlor, had been sleeping next door in the bar area. Again though, after checking the dates on the magazines beside the bed, it appeared that whomever this person was, they had moved on a long time ago.

The documents I found lying around both the parlor and bar suggest that this place closed back around 1997/98, and from the stack of unpaid bills that were in the office, I'd say it was because the owners went bankrupt. A true shame.

Please, let me know what you thought of this entry, if there's something it is lacking or if there are too many / too few photos. Any advice and tips are quite welcome.

Summer Vacation – Takeda Shrine

To celebrate the beginning of summer, and try to calm my stir craziness, the last weekend before vacation, I talked Debu into taking a trip into Kofu-shi to see the Takeda Shrine. Unfortunately for both of us, that day ended up being one of the hottest and most unforgiving days of the entire year. During the time it took us just to bike to the train station and then walk to Takeda, I was already getting rather red.

Hello Kitty is sacred, who knew?

The shrine was absolutely lovely, filled with many interesting relics, Shinto priests going about their days, and a random Hello Kitty statue

blessed tree

The only issue though, was that during the time it took us to walk around the small shrine grounds and start to head to another area, we had already gone through 4L of water and I was starting to get rather dizzy, even when sitting in the shade. It quickly occurred to us that I was having the early symptoms of a heatstroke, so plans were scrapped for instead trying to find a shaded place with water.

mmm horse

The place ended up being a yakitori shop that for whatever reason had horse on the menu, it turns out that horse does not taste all that great, and also that Debu is great at making me feel bad for dragging him outside into extreme heat.  Who would’ve guessed?

By the time we arrived back home, it was becoming pretty clear that I had received more than just a minor sunburn, it ended up being  a 2^nd degree burn that would linger and cause immense pain for nearly two full weeks, all the while making me look like a disfigured burn victim.

The burn was so bad in fact, that multiple days were spent with my shoulders wrapped in gauze and trying to find new ways to do things without the use of much arm movement. 

2 weeks into it

 

yea, those are blisters. Quite painful.

The process of not moving was going fairly well, until the last day of school, which all of the staff celebrated with a massive enkai (drinking party). During the night I was deemed pretty awesome for my drinking prowess and everyone fell in love with Debu because, well, he speaks Japanese. It all came to bite me in the ass though, as at some point during the night I split open my burns again, and spent the entire next day with hurt shoulders and a hangover that threatened to make even leaving bed end with bad results.

Totally worth it.

Adventure Time

I have been rather absent as of late, and as much as I would like to say that it was due to being far too busy having fun and exploring the country, that is not the truth, I have simply been lacking in the motivation department, and for that, I apologize. I know that not many people read this blog, but the few that do are close friends and family members, and I promised all of you upon my departure that I would keep you updated through this venue, and have failed to do so.  I am truly sorry.

So, with that out of the way, it is now time for me to try and play catch up a bit.

Two weekends ago, David and I went camping with another ALT (assistant language teacher) that I met through a forum called YETI (Yamanashi English Teachers International), it was great for both me and the other girl, because we were apparently both going a bit stir crazy with having a lack of things to do. It also helped, that she lived down in Nanbu, which is very close to Mt. Fuji.  It was great to have a weekend outside of the house, and even better to have one with great company in the middle of a gorgeous mountain region. 

The view of Nanbu

  We started our journey out by going to a small town festival at the top of one of the lower peaks, (which had a lovely view of Nanbu below where we got to meet a very nice old woman who was wearing a crocheted outfit she had made, that featured a bit more skin then I had wanted to see that day. She turned out to be the grandmother of 2 of Tara’s (the other ALT) students, and was kind enough to show us around.

She was also kind enough to treat us to a tea ceremony where we got some amazing snacks 

On the way back down to Tara’s apartment to get ready for the mountains, we passed many gorgeous flowers, and David informed us about how some bees like to get drunk and violent, he always seems to know the strangest trivial information…

I couldn't help but be amused.

Next we stopped for lunch at a little park that Tara knew of, and on the way up there we saw a freaking monkey! Sadly said monkey was too quick for me to get a photo of him, but it still made me pretty happy since I had heard from a lot of my cowokers that it’s pretty rare to see them in Yamanashi.  The park has some great Buddhist statues in it.

The bibs and hats are supposed to help protect children from harm, but to me, they looked a bit silly. 

some of the rapids we played in

After a nice meal, we finally headed to our camping destination, high up in the mountains. The location we decided upon was right alongside the stream and added the wonderful melody of rushing water to our entire stay.

We spent much of the remaining sunlight working our way down the stream and climbing down rapids and mini-waterfalls, it was quite a bit of fun, but I still wish that we had managed to find a good spot to really swim.

Once we had our fill of wandering the water, we headed upwards to check out the local onsen. For those of you who do not know, an onsen is a public bath where people bathe in hot sulfur water together in the nude. It was my first time, and I will fully admit, the first few minutes were rather awkward for me, especially since I had just met Tara that day and here we suddenly were chatting naked on top of a mountain with a bunch of old Japanese women. 

It was still a lot of fun though, and supposedly the hot mountain water mixed with sulfur is supposed to do wonders for your skin, and it was also nice because we met a sweet old woman who told us how her son lives in San Francisco and that she loves how beautiful America is. This encounter was made even better when we later found out that David had met her husband on the men’s side and had had almost an identical conversation with him about their son, suppose they are just an outgoing couple.

The rest of the night was spent playing cards, talking, and Tara telling a random conbini worker that I am an alcoholic (which is only partially true…), we had to spend most of the night huddled in our tent since it began raining, but that was fine, especially since the rain left us with a gorgeous fog the next morning.

We all woke up quite early the next morning to investigate the area away from the stream, and what we found were some amazing spiderwebs that a group of spiders had banded together to create. Some snails moving slowly to, well, somewhere. And a rather creepy empty building covered in rust and broken appliances. 

freaking creepy.

this is where every leech in Japan lives

On the way back down, Tara suggested we take a hike to see some gorgeous waterfalls, but we never quite made it to the bottom, because it would appear the trail leading to them is where every leech in Japan lives. During our hour or so on that trail, I personally picked off 22 of the buggers and am not ashamed to admit I was the first one to chicken out and head back up, the leeches just thought I was far too tasty

While still cringing from our encounter with the leeches, well, except David, who actually thought they were really cool and kept messing with them, we stumbled upon some rather strange remains of… something. We still have no idea what it used to be, but it was certainly odd. I did not get to go in as far as I had hoped though, because David pointed out a weird bug to Tara and she freaked out, proclaiming she had had enough bug encounters for the day. 

Upon calming down from all the bugs, it was decided that we should go to Tara’s favorite organic restaurant in the area, which also happened to be right across the way from Mt. Fuji, it also turned out that I had heard of this place from a documentary about the Jukai (aka suicide forest), so I was quite happy to check it out.   The food was quite tasty, although rather pricy since it was all made on site from their own gardens.

neat organic cafe

Overall it was a fantastic weekend, and while we did end up spending more money they we had originally planned, it was worth it to get rid of all my pent up frustrations from being stuck inside.

Now, I will close this off with a cute photo of David and I being, well, cute.