Haikyo

Over the last few years I’ve had the good fortune to photograph several abandoned mountain settlements not that far from Tokyo. There was this surprisingly large collection of houses and buildings, some remarkably intact homes of former forestry workers, and the crumbling structures of a long-empty hamlet.

This latest find doesn’t contain quite as many personal items as the others, but what it lacks in old photos and possessions, it makes up for in atmosphere. The late August heat and humidity meant there was no shortage of greenery, but at the same time the foliage blocked out a lot of the summer sun to create a suitably fitting half-light of sorts.

There are also enough houses and decay to offer intriguing hints about the lives once lived there, and indeed how long it has been since the last resident left. A slowly disappearing time capsule that is very much of a particular period and place, and yet there’s also a distinctly universal element at play as well, evoking as it does those ever-present human preoccupations of impermanence and the relentless passage of time.

A couple of months ago I put together a photo series of long-abandoned televisions. The dated technology and retro designs of such sets are always interesting, but for me at least, it’s the quietness they seem to emanate that really makes them special. Screens that families once sat around and socialised in front of now left unused and utterly silent, creating a weird sense of loss of sorts. A feeling I also get with old telephones, so it made sense to put together a similar collection.

At some point in the past we’ve all waited desperately for a phone to ring, or indeed dreaded that once common sound, but these old-school models, photographed over a period of 10 years or so, will never take a call again. All those long-ago conversations they were once privy to now lost in time — connections, both literal and otherwise, having disappeared forever into the void. Yet in many ways that doesn’t matter in the slightest, as looking at them now, almost entirely without context, it’s arguably just as interesting to speculate on who might have used them, and what they may have talked about.

When exploring in the far west of Tokyo last week, I was reminded of a bar out there and the absolutely lovely 93-year-old who owned it. A memory that in turn made me think about the area’s long-abandoned ropeway, as it was an attraction the old lady had actually ridden on when she was younger.

Open and ready for passengers at the start of 1962, the 622 metre cable car ride was, in part, built to capitalise on the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Just like the 2020 Games, however, things didn’t quite work out as planned, and visitor numbers simply weren’t substantial enough. An outcome that perhaps shouldn’t have been all that surprising considering the out of the way location, the short, one-stop hop over a lake, and the meagre 0.6 metre height difference between stations. So a mere 4 years after it opened, operations were halted on December 1st 1966. Ostensibly just for the winter, it was an end of year break that lasted until 1975, when an official suspension was announced. A state the site has stayed in ever since — clearly never opening again, and yet at the same time never actually closing.

Left to slowly decay and staying pretty much untouched for decades, there’s now graffiti on the platform, plus more recently on at least one of the cable cars, so that aspect, and the slightly tenuous Olympic connection, seemed like as good a time as any to re-edit these photos from 8 years ago. A time when everything was almost as it was after that last journey over the lake more than 50 years ago.

With individual rooms and connected parking spaces, the love hotel below has a fairly common design for small, relatively out of the way places.

Built in the late 60s or early 70s, the rooms were presumably quite modern at the time, but unsurprisingly they now look incredibly dated to say the least. That said, they can’t have looked that much better in the early 90s when the hotel was somehow still operational. Needless to say it’s impossible to know how many customers they actually had back then, but it’s probably safe to assume it wasn’t many — hence the eventual closure of the business in November 1992.

The one slightly odd thing is that lone guests and families were welcome, which is clearly unusual for a love hotel. Not that it makes any difference now of course. Little does after almost 30 years of very visible decay. Dilapidation that admittedly did make reaching the rooms quite difficult, but ultimately it was worth the effort. It always is. The chance to see and quietly take in the slow, unrelenting passage of time never fails to feel special. In fact, so much time has now passed that it’s probably fair to assume that the passion once felt in these rooms has long since fizzled out, and yet love, against all the odds, still lives on.