As I've mentioned lately, I've taken to heading up to Shogunzuka to try to catch the sunset in hopes of getting lucky and being able to photograph one that's spectacular. During the five-minute drive home one day recently, I noticed this view...

That big building in the background looks totally decrepit, and despite having driving by it a bazillion times, I'd not noticed it until now. I find these kinds of places somewhat fascinating, and along the same lines, posted Abandoned House Returning To Nature last month, and about the razing of an Old House of Bamboo and Mud last year.

I had no idea what it was, but finally the other day I headed over, and it turns out to have been much more interesting than I had first imagined.

In the picture above, note the set of stairs running to the left of the building (the main approach is via those stairs), and also the tree in front of the left side of the building (because it's not in front of the building, but in the building, sticking out the front. We'll see more below.)

The nearest corner in the shot above is where the main entrance is, facing the stairs, so continuing up the stairs to the corner and turning right, you see this inviting portal....

I had a similar shot on my previous post, A Few Kyoto Entrances.

Not having had any idea what the building actually was, I guess I had built up a subconscious idea that it was a dorm or low-rent apartment of some sort, likely because of my experiences detailed in Forsaken: Kyoto University's Kumano Dorm.

It is clearly abandoned now, but I was somewhat surprised to see that it had been a business of some sort. The writing on the shutter above has a phone number, and says in English “Opening: Every Sunday and National Holidays”

In taking the shot above, I sat on the steps to the house across the way. An old lady lived there, and we chatted a while about the place. Her accent was one so extremely thick that I couldn't understand much, but did learn this: the outside was never particularly nice, but it had been quite nice inside. There are five floors. A man had lived there, and when he died some years ago, it just went to pot due to neglect and vandals. An attempt was made to sell it, but no one will buy it because the situation is just too difficult to deal with. Kids call it a haunted house (お化け屋敷 · obakeyashiki).

The situation she referred to is that it's on the side of a very steep hill, and is surrounded by other properties, so heavy equipment has no easy access. Even if combined with one of the properties between it and the road such that it would have frontage and access, the cost of taking it down likely far exceeds the cost of the land. It's just a no-win situation.

The front of the building has a big sign in the upper corner, reading “全和凰美術館” (Zen Kowako Museum), and searching around on the Internet after I got home I found an older photo of the metal shutter, fully closed indicating the name in English as Hua Huan Museum. I'm guessing that Kowako Zen was the professional name used by the artist whose real name was Hua Huan. From what I have been able to figure out while searching, he was born in Korea in 1909, came to Japan when he was 30, eventually apprenticed under Kunitaro Suda (1891-1961), a Kyoto painter apparently noteworthy enough to have a Wikipedia entry.

He was apparently a successful artist. In 1982 there was an exhibition “50 years of work by Kowako Zen” hosted in five cities in Japan and Korea, and perhaps emboldened by that, in the same year he founded the museum that is the subject of the present blog post.

He passed away in 1996. You can still find his work on Yahoo! Auctions as I write this.

I'm guessing that he was really eccentric, because what I found so amazing about this building is not how dilapidated time and vandals and neglect have made it, but how it was build dilapidated to begin with. Pretty much every aspect of what you can see of its construction reveals the utmost in sloppy, dangerous, haphazard, jerry-built jury-rigged “workmanship” that makes the average slumlord look like Bob Vila or Norm Abram.

Those familiar with construction techniques will find hours of amusement and horror in inspecting the large versions of the images that follow.

Many of the outside surfaces were stuccoed as if the stucco was paint, put on thinly enough to just cover (sort of, barely) whatever was underneath...

Often the stucco didn't even cover the light mesh he used (the mesh looks more appropriate for straining carrots than supporting cement), and even the vines that (later?) grew and died were thicker than the stucco...

I think that there was an original building that was smaller, and that the guy then built it up over time. One of the exposed boards over the entrance shows the old kind of rough-hewn semi-flat teardrop-head “cut nails” one might find in The States in construction that dated to the 1700s and 1800s....

Directly beside the entrance was the former electrical hookup, for which no expense was spared in making it look aesthetic and natural. Smartly hidden in plain sight, the ugly conduit looks just like, er, grout, and the box itself like a fine slab of granite....

The only thing that could be done to add to the tasteful design would be to place a sign on it saying “DO NOT LOOK AT UGLY ELECTRICAL HOOKUP.”

Above that was the remains of an awning that just defies explanation...

On the far right of the photo above, you can see a bit of a tree trunk. That's the tree I asked you to note in one of the pictures we saw before, of the front of the building facing the road. The next shot shows it more clearly, that a tree has grown up from.... somewhere... and has destroyed part of the exterior wall...

The wall that was destroyed was apparently the back of a shoe closet. It's adjacent to the entrance area, so the shoe closet makes sense. In the next detail shot, you can see shoes, slippers, a milk carton, and a bunch of Asahi Lager Beer bottles....

Taking a wider view of the front, you can see..... well, I'm not sure...

It's hard to figure this out, but it's clear that the vines were more sturdy than the wall. I'm guessing that the original building was tall but not deep, and that the guy tried to connect it to another building next to it, throwing up some timber to make a roof that's mostly still there, but whose walls have long deteriorated.

The balcony you can see in the first of the pair above look decidedly “aftermarket” to me, with cinderblock walls and wooden floors. Only Lord knows how this can possibly remain standing, but I suspect that the overwhelming vine growth has imparted more strength than the original construction did.

Swinging back around to the entrance side, looking up, I see raw rebar sticking out below the windows, so perhaps balconies were on the agenda here, too...

As you climbed the stairs up the hillside, the view of the building changed, with more vine and less detail, but still a lot of incomprehensible construction to bemuse and amuse...

The big ball hanging under the eaves in the upper-left corner of the shot above is a big wasp nest, I think...

From the hillside behind, you're looking directly into what the old lady said was the fifth floor...

Among the many things to note in this picture is the circular window toward the left. A number of other buildings in this area have circular windows, which otherwise seem very rare. My gut tells me that this is an important architectural clue that might be used to date the structure (if you didn't want to go to the trouble of asking the city to check the tax records).

Moving further to the left, now at the opposite corner from (and four or five stories above) the entrance, we're at a scene that at first glance looks like simple deterioration, but like so many, reveals upon closer inspection construction that is horrid on every level...

You can see in the upper-left the TV antenna that was featured at the top of this post. There's also a lot of thick looped wire all tangled up all over the place, and I'm not sure what it is, but my first impression is that it might have been something that was intended to be a decorative fence along a garden path, but which the guy used in lieu of a safety rail when he decided to make the roof a living space.

I'd like to end this post on a less ramshackled note, so let's return to the main entrance, where the museum name is still painted on the window, and a pleasant porch light waits to welcome you home...

The paper stuck to the window notes that a prefectural policeman visited at about 4:30pm on October 11th of some unknown year, with a handwritten note saying “No Entry”.

I took the shot above while exploring a small neighborhood near my place this morning. I'll have plenty of interesting things to share from this morning's adventure, but for today, just the picture above (did you see the tiny, curious dog?) and a few uninteresting things...

I posted the other day about the Shinto evergreen/tangerine display that people adorn their cars with during the New Year season. Those displays are also often found above entrances to homes, and with the post from the other day fresh in my mind, I took the opportunity to snap a few pictures of these displays when I came across them during this morning's adventures.

Here's one on a fairly modern house...

Here's another, on a large, old house...

As you can see from the wide shot above, the house is old enough to have external knob wiring (like this place), leading me to suspect that the house was built prior to electricity being available.

Also of note is that this particular house is about as “middle of nowhere” that you can get less than 200 meters from a major thoroughfare. To get to this house, you have to leave the main road via a small side road that heads up a hill, then take an even smaller, steeper road that juts off almost 180 degrees back toward the left, then wind your way a bit up and down and around the side of a mountain, until you come to a thin paved offshoot barely wide enough for a scooter, but steep enough that you'll have a second thought about using one. At one point this offshoot does a hairpin turn that's sufficiently tight (while still going uphill at a steep angle) that it's advised to just park and walk the rest of the way, then continue on the path up a steep hill until it makes a 90-degree turn, the path flattens out, and then ends.

That's where this doorway is. (You can follow along by viewing the map via the “map & image data” link under the picture.)

So, now that I have a “doorway” theme going in this post, I'll share two more doorways that I came across this morning.. The first has pretty much the thinnest door I've ever seen:

And finally, this little gem...

The museum above, less than a mile from my place, was the reason for this morning's outing. I'll leave its somewhat interesting (and entirely dilapidated) story for another post (here).

One of the rooms at the “Otsu Yumekko” (a nearby playland we visited in February) is set aside for playing with Kapla planks. They have thousands of them, and the space is large, so it was like a mini Dubai with all the various construction going on...

Each big box holds 1,000 pieces, and runs about 400 bucks! They had plenty.

One guy was making a tall tower with a little boy...

Knowing that a kid that young severely shortens the life span of anything built with balance, I kept one eye on them prepared to catch the inevitable collapse.

I felt relieved for the guy when he finally got his own picture, and sure enough, 20 seconds later the kid bumped the thing, tried to catch it (which is like trying to hold back the tide), and it all came crashing down...

Fun stuff.

For reasons I've yet to fully investigate, it's common around this time of year to see vehicles in Japan adorned with some kind of display incorporating twine, an evergreen twig, white strips of paper, and sometimes a tangerine. Just based on what else I know of Japan, I'm sure it's related to Shinto, because the white strips of paper are usually the zigzag streamers used in Shinto rituals. It's probably mostly just a non-religious custom now, having evolved from a religious purification ritual of some sort. That's my guess.

Anyway, the picture above is of an old truck on Kakeroma-jima Island that I took on our trip to Amami a year ago. The plastic bag used to protect the sprigs/tangerine completely destroys the visual aesthetic, so I'm guessing this one is actually more ritual and less custom.

A few more sort of random shots from my collection...

“BOSS” is a brand of Suntory ice coffee (for which Tommy Lee Jones is a pitchman). The yellow sticker in the corner of the vending machine says “Value! 100 Yen. Only in Kyushu” (Kyushu being the region of Japan that Amami is part of).

Nothing too exciting today, sorry. I've been tired and uninspired lately.

In the Kyoto Winter Preview I posted the other day – about an uncommon snowfall in Kyoto last winter – the story left off with us arriving at the Heian Shrine....

Normally you can go up and through the big gate (such as done by these cute kids in kimono and these demons and this family), but this day it was roped off with “beware of falling snow” signs, as if there was actually enough snow to accumulate on the roof to a dangerous level. It seems sort of silly to me, but in any case, you can still enter the shrine grounds through doors on the side.

Now we're at the point where I took the pictures that lead off the post I published that day, Amazing Snow at the Heian Shrine.

I like the ornate little building in the background, and we've seen it here on my blog before, most recently as the backdrop to a kimono-laden family portrait.

Then there are the little ladles featured on the previous post, Snowy Quiz: What am I?, which, as I expected, didn't prove to be very difficult....

Back to the day at hand, it took me a few moments to realize how this square of non-snowiness came about...

Under the ground at that point is a big cistern, one of a pair I saw being used at the event covered in my Intense Burn: Shinto Rite at the Heian Shrine post. The water must have warmed the ground enough to melt the snow as it landed.

The short fence/railing seen in the background of the shot above is pretty in its own right...

The red/orange fence is apparently fragile enough that they don't want people actually touching it, so there's a light twine and wood fence just in front of it. I liked how the wet, sticky snow built up even on the tops of the wood posts, like little tufts of frosty white hair....

The colors are wrong, but it makes me think of the Muppet Beaker.

Several buildings in the shrine complex have these lanterns; one of my first pictures with my D200 a few years back was Lanterns at the Heian Shrine, of those on the building across the courtyard from this one.

We were the first visitors to the shrine that morning, but soon others came...