Kappa Hotel: The Middle Floors

The supper before the deed.

 The plan was simple - to take a train to Kinugawa Onsen town, arrive in the dead of night, grab a quick bite, stock up on food and provisions, spend the rest of the night in the haikyo, and find access to the rooftop by the break of dawn, and watch as the sun rose upon the town. And maybe explore a little more afterwards. Of course, we'd top it all with a soak in the hot bathes of Kinugawa.
I geared up - flashlight, camera, first aid kit, and warm clothes, and met Millo in Ueno station, and we headed for the mountainous Tochigi prefecture.


 The ride there was somewhat of a confusing mess, but when we did emerge in Kinugawa Onsen station, even later than we thought we would, light snow was falling. We stocked up on easy-to-eat food in a convenience store, and followed the river up to our destination: Kappa Hotel.
The place was a gigantic megaplex of a hotel built on the side of a cliff - two wings connected by a central building, each wing eight floors high, and most of all, in a visible state of decay. Once upon a time, it must've been a really majestic building, but it was abandoned in 1999 due to a decrease in tourism, and left to fall apart where it stood. Finding our way in and through wasn't an issue at all. We were more concerned about whether we would be able to go through the whole thing in the time we had.

It won't be long before this one's overgrown too.

 We entered through the ground-level floor, easily finding a sliding window that would let us in within the first five minutes of arriving on site.
 I say ground-level floor, but truly, this was the fourth. The floors below descended into the cliff, deep in the shadow of the valley.
 As one would suspect, after 15 years of decay, the ground level floor was blasted to hell by the elements, and this would be the one floor in the deepest stage of being taken over by nature again, with weeds growing out of the very cracks in the floor, and the boards of the floor itself completely rotten. We fell through several times, hitting the foundation of the building itself and thankfully never getting injured in the process.
But we knew this floor was only a tough passage into the more interesting floors above - and eventually, below.
The west wing staircase was not as hard to find as it was to walk to, with the floor giving way beneath us, but we managed.

One of what could've been 50-70 similar rooms.

Making our way up, we arrived upon troves of interesting rooms, giving us a peek at what the place must have been like in the past. We darted in and out of the traditional tatami rooms of the hotel, still fully furnished with chairs, bedding, tables, framed paintings, fridges, each of which even was filled with old alcohol. Hallways too cluttered with debris made us go through balconies to clear rooms. But in walking through the rooms as so, we found some inside which practical guides to the hotel still remained. And inside such a guide, one inevitably finds a floor map. I held onto that.

The invaluable map. I was thankful I could read enough to understand all this.

Once a clubroom.

Using the map, we easily found the rooms we were hoping to stumble upon that might have taken us quite a bit of exploration otherwise. The banquet hall, with its cafe and bar clubroom formed the bulk of the central and west wings of the fifth floor, and truly, these rooms must've once been grandiose. Pictures of the very banquet room we stood in lay inside an album on the bar counter, showing us scenes from the past where the hotel was bustling with visitors. But now, there was so much clutter and overturned tables and chairs that it was hard to make our way through at times - a fact made worst by the darkness.

 When exploring haikyo, vandalism is the only certainty, so it was par for course that tables would be overturned. Messages written on the walls, such as "this is a place to die" or simply, "die, die, die" were something we had expected. Other messages were just interesting or even entertaining: "this room is sweet!" it said on a door, and at one point "this is the Master Key" a message said, with an arrow pointing at a dangling key.
 Of course, names of people and dates were written all over by groups that had cleared the haikyo before us.

But what truly was disturbing was that which was just plain unusual: in one of the bathrooms, hair was scattered across the floor - intentionally cut, by the looks of it. Whether it was a person's or a doll's couldn't be told from a mere look.
 And then, it was on the sixth floor that our flashlights caught sight of antlers. Surely the layout of the place was tampered with - there was no other explanation as to why there would be two petrified stags in the middle of a hallway.

There are two in this picture.

For fear I'm dragging on too long for a single article (at least where this blog is concerned) I'll stop here, but all this is only half of what we've seen in Kappa Hotel. The very top and the very bottom floors still beckoned to us, and I'll go on about that soon enough.