The Asylum

The team minus Agha.

"I draw the line between hospitals and asylums," Erika said to me as I went through my list of Adventure Friends, inviting them to hop on board my latest venture. Her curiosity eventually got the better of her. But this was one adventure I knew not everyone would be willing to join me in. Even Millo had to think twice, and he had been on this journey before. But he, Agha, and Christina answered the call along with Erika, and soon we were five, making the trip down to deep Saitama on board local trains, chasing fear like a junkie chases a high.

Not all of my companions wanted to be here by the time we took this pic.

The building we stood before was once known as the Asakura Hospital. Today, it's a place known only to self-reputed ghost hunters. For 14 years has it stood in silence, disturbed only by those who dared breach its walls to uncover its secrets. In its heydays, the Asakura was a mental clinic, you see, and when it shut down, rumors of the reason for its abandonment spread throughout the urban explorers, and soon attracted the ghost hunters. Some sources say the place shut down because an unreasonable amount of deaths made authorities suspicious of medical malpractice occurring within its walls. The last time Millo visited, said he, the sounds of doors opening and closing echoed throughout the building, despite its seeming stillness.

 The way was basically paved for us already by other explorers. Through breeches in fences, we managed to enter the facility, and found it to be in in complete disarray. The first floor was a mess full of broken glass and torn up pages, with messages lining the walls. If there's one thing urban explorers like to do is play tricks on the next batch of explorers following them. It was all we could do to ignore the messages written in red along the walls, saying things in the vein of "there is nothing to do here but die." But I could feel the discomfort rising in some of my companions already.

 A branch in our path soon offered itself to us - downwards to the basement, or up to the upper floors and roof? We decided to plunge into the belly of the beast, and so down it was.
 The basement looked like a dungeon.

Not really sure what it's an x-ray of, though.

 Consisting of nothing but a hallway lined with prison-like cells, the basement was spooky in its eerie silence. Wheelchairs were scattered throughout the floor, inside and out of cells alike, though I suspect this is also the doing of past explorers. We made our descent in relative silence, passing row upon row of rusting bars. Would this be where they kept the unstable patients? Upon a table in one of the rooms at the end of the hall were scattered record books full of black sheets that were immediately familiar to me from my previous experiences with Haikyo. I lifted one to my light and confirmed that they were x-rays.

 On the higher floors, we found the patients' rooms and beds. Unlike other ruins I had been to in the past, most furnishings in the building had been removed, save only the hospital beds, which stood where they were, gathering dust. Several rooms full of them were all that was left of the upper levels, and silently, so as not to wake the neighborhood we could see through the windows, we made our way to the roof.
 The town was asleep. We decided to rest here and started joking amongst each other, and I found myself enjoying the cool breeze under the night sky. And that was when some of us heard it - the sound of footsteps coming up the very same steps. Panic took our group, but we responded fast - Agha was fast out of sight, and Millo took care of hiding himself and making sure Christina did the same. Erika and I opted to hide behind the stairwell, and I positioned myself so that I could see who the incoming party was before they could see me.

 But rather than the authorities, the group turned out to be a smaller posse of ghost hunters. I took care not to scare the shit out of them as I popped out of the shadows and introduced myself, but ended up doing so anyway. My companions soon came out of their respective hiding spots too, and we soon began conversing. "You know this place is famous for ghosts?" the guide in their group asked me. "Have you seen the blood covered bed?" No, in fact, we hadn't.
 They brought us down a floor and showed us the one bed covered in deep brown stains. It was soon after that that the other groups left in silence, without so much as a goodbye. I'm a skeptic by nature, I guess, but it was around this time that some of my companions decided they weren't keen on staying around too much longer. Come to think of it, the group didn't really talk about that bed much after that.

A Brief Visit of Chichibu

Many things happen in the town of Chichibu, in Saitama. It's a town that, although calm during most of the year, brims with festivals on multiple occasions, and has found its way to the public eye. The town is spread on a fairly wide area which it also shares with vast fields of flowers of different types - so many in fact that it doesn't take all that much luck at all to find at least one such field in full bloom. This, and its surrounding mountains and temples, have given Chichibu somewhat of a picturesque look, while removing none of its tranquility.

 I found myself making a short trip to Chichibu in order to have a look at the town, not quite sure what exactly to expect, and found myself walking amongst pilgrims. As it turns out, one of Chichibu's main selling points to visitors is the 34 temples scattered in the forest and mountain trails. The pilgrimage through all 34 temples has been done for nearly 700 years now, but though the pilgrims of Chichibu today don't necessarily do it for the sake of actual religion, it was easy for me to see the appeal of such a journey. Based on nothing but a picture on a pamphlet, I picked one of the 34 and decided I'd have a taste of it.

 Temple 28, the Hashidate-do, was only a short distance away from one of the train stations of the local line, and a very short hike up one of the mountains lead directly to it. Nestled amongst tall trees at the top of a staircase, tucked under one of the faces of the mountain behind it, the small, ancient temple was a small marvel in and of itself, and radiated with history and lore. Unlike most temples in Japan, it's said that as many as half of the temples in Chichibu are not attended by priests, and are instead cared and maintained for by locals. Happy about my discovery, I soon decided to move on.

  As I mentioned above, Chichibu's flower fields are also fairly well known. Unfortunately, I had just missed the blooming of the pink shibazakura (or moss phlox) fields, which is widely considered to be the most beautiful of the bunch. I did, however, catch the blooming of the buckwheat! Granted, buckwheat's not all that impressive of a flower at all, and I'm not even that big a fan of soba noodles, but it was still kind of neat to stand in a field of it. But a little color would have been nice.

 Altogether, though, I didn't spend so much time in Chichibu, and I'm quite aware that there are adventures to be had here if I went looking for them. There's rafting on the Arakawa river, and zip-lining from tree to tree a bus ride away from the center of the town, let alone the whole 100 kilometer pilgrimage across the 34 temples. But those will have to be for another day, perhaps.

Lions and White Tigers and Bears

When I asked my brother what he wanted to do in Tokyo, his list was quite bare.

1. See the Daibutsu
2. Buy shoes
3. See a white tiger

 As it figures, and I only learned of this recently, there is a place a little out of Tokyo where they do hold a white tiger, and that happens to be Tobu Dobutsu Koen - Tobu Zoo. So, sure as hell, we went.

Now, see, the zoo itself actually doubles as a theme park and is located in quite a suburban zone. In spite of the first and due to the second, the park finds itself pretty damn empty on weekdays, asides from old couples and the odd family on vacation. I was actually surprised they kept the theme park running, and as I reckon, most people go in for the zoo.
 And shit, as it so turns out, the zoo is quite nice - it better be, for two and a half times the entry fee of Ueno Zoo, not to mention the long train ride.
 But the zoo is spacious, well kept, and heck, the animals seem a hell of a lot healthier. I don't see lions and bears on a regular basis, but now that I've been to both zoos, even a pedant like myself can tell that the ones in Tobu look hell of better nourished and generally less...stressed out? Than the ones in the big city zoo.

What I also thought was pretty cool was the interactive exhibits one could just walk into a mingle with the animals in. Of course, they don't have these for tigers or elephants or crazy animals like that, but they did do it for the squirrel monkeys and kangaroos. Now if you're Australian, that ain't a thing because you have the damn beasts jumping around your backyard any way, but I've never touched a kangaroo before. They're fuzzy. And they're pretty ugly up close.

And of course, the star of the exhibit, much like Ueno has its pandas, was the white tiger we came for. Almost as interesting as the beast itself was the swarm of middle-aged women around the enclosure. We did come at the right time, though, seeing as the tiger had just recently produced four cubs and we got to see them wrestle and nestle with each other. No doubt it won't be too long before those are sold to some other zoo in another country, so the time was ripe indeed and it was satisfying for the eye.

Kawagoe - A Discovery Impromptu

What wonders and horrors could await us here?

It was Eri who left me a message one day, as I got home from work. "Have you been to Kawagoe before?" it read. "I just saw a pic and thought you might like it, maybe."
"Let's do that this Saturday," I told her the next time I saw her. And we did.
 And, man, yes. I like Kawagoe after all. It's not a place I would've found out about or chosen to go to on my own, and for that I count my blessings that Eri showed me the way and came along.
 Located less than an hour out of Tokyo, Kawagoe's a reminder of what the city used to be in a time long gone. Of course, a lot of Kawagoe's been modernized. But all it takes is a few steps out of the concrete curtain to find a little bit of treasure here. It helps to know where to start, though, unlike Eri and I who ran from station to station and in circles looking for each other. But when I did find her, she had several maps (and a sense of direction twelve times better than mine), and with those in hand, we plowed onwards.

 The bulk of what's interesting to see in Kawagoe is located on one particular street named karazukuri no machinami, which is lined with very rustic looking shops and restaurants, most of which specialize selling equally traditional wares or foods. The street offers a window into what Tokyo was before it was even named Tokyo, with many of the store owners out in the streets in front of their own shops despite the relative cold of early February.


And it's from this main street that many of Kawagoe's most interesting features stem from or branch out of, one of which being the Confectionery Row, where rows of shops lay in wait that specialize in...candy.
 All of a sudden, I'm six years old again. I have a sweet tooth. So does Eri. We waste no time in buying one piece of every candy we dare try, sitting down, and eating them on the spot, where I was urged to try strange and marvelous things and others that in some cultures may be seen as only suitable for cruel and unusual punishment.

  Candy aside, Kawagoe also holds a few other vestiges of the past, one of which is the Bell of Time, which still chimes four times a day (although we didn't get to hear it out for ourselves.) The structure itself has a presence to it, and stands relatively taller than its neighbors. Behind it were a shrine and, oddly enough, a set of children's swings. "Shut up and go play, mommy and daddy are praying."
 

Behold what remains of my kingdom!

Our journey across Kawagoe also set us with another destination in mind: the Honmaru Goten, the sole remaining building of the former Kawagoe castle.
 The picture on the right...Well, that isn't it. It's a ditch. Apparently this particular ditch served to protect the outskirts of the castle. Nearby was a panel set up for touristic purposes explaining all the great things about the ditch which I couldn't care to remember. Luckily, though, we found there was more to the castle just a little further down the street.


The Honmaru Goten, while not as majestic as any of the famous bigger castles you'll find throughout Japan, is still a dignified and legitimate cultural heritage, and, crossing out the Imperial Palace in the dead center of Tokyo, which is inaccessible to visitors, is the closest castle to the capital city. A quick visit of the building costs nothing but 200¥, a price you truly can't go wrong with despite the time it takes to circumnavigate the place being brief. But a true buff of Japanese history wouldn't want to pass the chance up. As for ourselves, the major part of our pleasure in visiting the 500 year-old castle went a little something like this:

"Oh, Eri! Go stand over there!"

"Dum-dee-dum"

"Okay."

"Now take a picture of my king-like pose!"

Not that it wasn't fun. It was. As an alternative to what I did, though, you could go in and actually learn something. The place is a well-arranged exhibition that goes through the details of the castle's layout and its history concerning the Hojo Clan and the battle for the Kanto region and so forth. If I write about Japanese history, it'll be for another time, though.

  There is, actually, more to see of Kawagoe, but our day trip, for all intents and purposes, ended here. We unfortunately only made it to the Kita-In Buddhist temple upon its closing, and were unable to get in and take a good look at the 500-some statues of Buddha. But if I ever make a return trip, that'll be for then.

Wait, seriously?

 After a muddled and confused walk to the train station and a brief ride, I bid Eri farewell until the day after the next, where she made me change one of our flyers at work, like, a billion times.

As if you couldn't guess, many of these photos were taken by Eri. Notably, the good ones. Credit where it's due.

Nichitsu by Day

We didn't get a good idea of the scope of the Ghost Town of Nichitsu until day broke, so deep was the darkness permeating the area. It was when the sun rose that we could see all the houses on the cliffs above and down the streets below, and so we wasted no time in delving deeper, exploring the town high and low. What we found didn't disappoint.

  Before going ghost, Nichitsu was fully operational as an independent town: it even had its own grocery store. Early that morning, we hit several points of interest. Nichitsu town was built up-cliff, with public buildings being located at the lower points, and residential ones located higher up. We didn't truly know about the lower point of the city until it was quite literally lit up to us, and the first construction we entered was the hospital.

  The hospital bore all the remnants of a full modern medical facility, including hardware and shelves full of medicine. Each room seemed to have served its own purpose: a first one was littered with nondescript black vinyl sheets, which, upon lifting for examination, we discovered to be x-rays. I beamed in delight as I realized I stood in a pile of such sheets big enough to be that of every bone ever broken in the town.
Other rooms included a sick persons' rest room, stained bed and all, a surgery room, complete with tools such as scalpels and an operating table, a chemists lab, with compounds such as hydrochloric acid still sitting on the shelves, and a dentists' room, with its floor completely smashed in. We delighted as every room brought us something completely new and seldom expected. One room even included organ tissue encapsulated in jars, but we could scarcely recognize the contents of the vials we lifted to the sun, but many of them were not human: several contained insects and other unrecognizable myriapods.
As we stumbled back out into the sunlight, we had little doubt that the next discovery could not be as interesting as the last. And we were wrong.

Surprisingly enough, the small town even had its own theater. Decades of wear weighed down upon the ceiling, planks of it littering the floor already. The place had a VIP room with windows looking straight at the stage, interior balconies, and a backstage room, the latter which decayed worst than any of the other parts of the building. It was easy to imagine the townsfolk gathering here every now and then for a show or a play.

Only after we were sure we had visited every single building there was to visit did we leave Nichitsu. We were satisfied. Our curiosity about the skeleton of the town, so desolate and remote, had finally met its answer, and after spending a massive twelve hours session of exploring, it was fatigue that finally claimed us, rather than any spirit or ghost.

I think I will, one day, return to Nichitsu, but for now, I leave the place to its eternal resting state for the next set of adventurers brave enough to climb up the mountain and face the village in its cold, deathlike trance.

PS: All photos on this post were taken courtesy of Lo. My camera died out the previous night.

Nichitsu by Night

I'm still tittering with excitement at what I had a chance to see and do in the last 24 hours. Just like Ashiomachi, the planning for Nichitsu has been a long time coming. Over the last month and a half, it's been a rush to gather an able crew, triangulate the location and arrange for the rental of a car to take us to one of the most desolate places in this part of Japan, and in some way I have this bizarre sense of pride in having accomplished it. Today, I've returned from a place long abandoned, that the country seems to want to have forgotten completely. I've lots to say about Nichitsu, so brace yourself for somewhat of a good read (at least comparatively to my regular posts.)

The Nichitsu Team

 There are some unfamiliar faces here I'd love to introduce before going into the whole adventure itself. The way the whole adventure played out, though, each member brought a little something to the table, so every one played an amazing role in our adventure.

Neal Pak and Nana Takeuchi.

 By the time the planning was starting to come together, Nana Takeuchi was the first person I had invited to the Ghost Town.
 At the time, she was my boss at My Gym. 
 Nana brought into the equation lock-picking, allowing our vehicle easy access through gates so that we could park the car within Nichitsu itself, away from the eyes of any potential security passing by.

Our driver, Lo.

Neal Pak is a Korean guy from Indianapolis, America, who I had met only a week before leaving. His taste for adventure instantly made me want to bring the guy along, and Neal turned out to be the best equipped one of any of us, owning all matters of rope, equipment and foodstuffs that he didn't hesitate to share during the journey.

Of course, we wouldn't have made it far without Jean-Paul Lo, who I have introduced a little while ago. Lo owns an international driving license, making it possible for him to bring us to our destination, which was otherwise unreachable. That aside, Lo stands quite tall and weighs a respectable 190lbs, which came quite handy in him kicking down doors.

Of course, the role I played was that of making sure we met our destination. Nichitsu does not show up on any GPS, nor does it have an address. Therefore I had to intersect different maps and bicycle paths existing on the internet and find an aerial photo of the place via satellite. Once I found Nichitsu, we manually input the coordinates into the GPS and the trick was done.

This town's as good as ours.

Unlike Ashiomachi, Nichitsu had no surveillance. Our adventure was a blur of jumping through windows, kicking down obstructing doors, and scaling walls. Don't be fooled by the flash-illuminated pictures: this place was pitch dark. Actual chances of getting lost were slim, since we could just as well yell to one another from either end of town, but there was always the risk of wild animals. On top of being dark, Nichitsu was also very cold, being located on a mountain. This also meant there was no cellphone signal. The four of us stuck together as a unit.

Armed with no light other than that of the stars above us and our own lamps, we took to the village with an efficient pace, and found it remarkably nonempty. The village was sizable, and, on that first night, we had managed to navigate through several apartment buildings and what seemed to be a town hall.
 A plethora of objects littered the floors, ranging from books to cutlery to game pieces and dolls, and the sheer number of things left behind was remarkable. Televisions were still connected to powerless walls.

Sweeping through the buildings.

What we knew of Nichitsu was the following: like Ashiomachi, its economy ran on mining. Predictably, the hollowing of the mines meant the collapse of the economy for the small town, forcing shops to close and people to evacuate.  Disturbingly enough, however, and this time unlike Ashiomachi, we did not find a consistent date for the collapse of Nichitsu as a town. Calendars on walls contradicted one another - some showing years as early as 1976. Others showed us 1984. Once calendar, found on the floor, showed us 1997, even. But it wasn't until we went into the last apartment building that we found any cause to feel disturbed by this.

The first thing to throw us off was the presence of recently discarded, new-looking shoes at the entrance. Soon, this was followed by the appearance of discarded calendars with dates going all the way through the first decade of the 2000's. Perplexed at the thought that some one might be using Nichitsu as a base, we pressed onwards, finding more and more signs of recent occupation in the crumbling rooms.
 The final room of the building took us by shock.
 New drapery adorned the beds, and fresh looking clothes hung by hooks. The room had clearly been arranged in a neat fashion, and by then we knew for sure: someone had been living in Nichitsu. However, unbeknownst to us whether it was the same resident who was responsible, clear knife marks adorned the walls, and words had been written into the same walls in red. Pornographic cut outs also hung from string contraptions reaching from one side of the room to the other.
 Who, in your opinion, would willingly choose to live secluded from society in such a place?
 We didn't linger too long.

Just outside, we found the perfect place to set up a campfire to drive away the cold. With a little tinkering, we managed to get quite a good one going, and, much to the amusement of the rest of us, Lo was quite efficient at breaking apart whole trees in order to feed the fire.
 Marshmallows were also brought out, courtesy of Nana, and we spent a few hours in the warmth of the flame, sharing a few jokes and stories. When morning came, we caught a little bit of sleep inside the car, before heading back out and exploring the second half of Nichitsu.

And trust me, we didn't even get to the good stuff quite yet!

Lake Town

Here's Koshigaya's Aeon Lake Town. Japan's biggest shopping center just won't fit in cramped-ass Tokyo, so it's way out here in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere, one hour away from the city. It's not even in the Tokyo prefecture. Hard to miss it, though. The place is 200,000 square meters large  and its own train station.
Speaking only in numbers, Lake Town houses 200 different stores and is the 28th biggest shopping center in the world. It's not exactly the closest to the top, but hell if it isn't big.

Accompanying me are Ken, Erika, and her daughter Maxine. Also, there's Andrew! He's Erika's 15 year old brother. For the sake of introductions, if someone took baby Maxine, made her ten times bigger and gave her the gift of speech, then the resulting life form would probably be a lot like Andrew.
 Here's a picture with both Andrew and Erika looking particularly like goblins. Maybe it runs in the family?

Chilling in a home hardware store.

Back to Koshigaya Lake Town, the mall is split into four sections: Water, Forest, Wind and the Outlet section, which is completely outdoors. The three hours we spent there took us through a little less than half of the place. Today being a national holiday, though, it was impossible to buy anything: lines stretched out even out of the doors of certain stores. As much as I also would've loved to buy some furnishing for my crib, the distance home was also a cumbersome obstacle. 

My highlight? Maybe just watching Maxine play around with the other kids in this lego-themed shop. The name of the shop itself, "clickbrick" looked alarmingly like "dickbrick" due to the poor choice of font for the shop's logo. But this is Japan, so who cares! Hurrah!
 But yeah, in conclusion, Laketown is like a big dog. It's big.