Last November I wrote about my visit to an abandoned mining town deep in the mountains of Saitama. This past week my co-worker and I returned to continue our explorations. He had discovered on the Net a web site by another foreigner in Japan who had thoroughly explored nearly all the buildings and we knew there was much more for us to seek out.

Our first visit was to the old gymnasium and auditorium. The ceiling had given way in some places sending shafts of sunlight into a large room with broken ping pong tables and a stage with a large purple curtain. Lines on the floor marked badminton courts. We spent several minutes in here looking around and taking photos before moving on.

Outside we had to follow a narrow path through the encroaching undergrowth. A large wasp – I mean very large because Saitama has wasps or maybe hornets that are about four centimetres long – was patrolling the area and my co-worker has an innate fear of large wasps and bees. He was very nervous as the insect buzzed back and forth between the two of us.

We were looking for the medical building and we found it was the first building we had passed when we had crossed a small iron bridge leading into the bushes from the road. A large window was without glass and my co-worker said he had read that the medical building was accessed through a broken window. Looking inside we saw dozens of test tubes on the floor. This had to be it. We entered and began exploring the rooms. The central floor had collapsed and we had to cautiously step over broken floor boards. There were many rooms of interest. The reception room had many old books and magazines dating back to the early seventies. A dental room had lots of old equipment that was falling into the collapsing floor and open cases of individual false teeth.

In the operating room the old operating table was still there with the padded cover ripped off and discarded on the floor. Unfortunately, the operating room light had been stolen. We had seen photos on the Net and I think I had even seen a photo in a book of photos of abandoned places in Japan, but only the light stand remained. There was the X-ray room with folders holding X-rays that we could still see when we held them up to the window, and there were rooms with old books and papers and various medical supplies.

But the room we had been looking for was the one that had all the jars of various body parts. Like the lab of Dr. Frankenstein, there were jars of various sizes with faded labels still holding white and grey objects in liquid that were once functioning organs. The prize find of this collection was the jar holding a human brain. Definitely something to photograph!

When we exited the building my co-worker was visited by the wasp-thing and it landed on his leg. It was all he could do to keep from running off like a mad man. I came out and looked at the enemy and saw that this was not a wasp or hornet but a horsefly that was some three centimetres long. I had never seen one so big before. Horseflies worried me more than wasps because horseflies are after food and that means blood. I have been bitten one or twice by a Canadian size horsefly and it really smarts. But this sucker was twice the size! However, the good thing is that horseflies can be smacked or flicked and they fly away. Food is no fun to get if it involves getting bashed. Wasps and hornets, on the other hand, visit out of curiosity in search of something edible but they don’t bite. Once they find there’s nothing to eat they take off again. If you smack them they get mad and might sting in self-defence. So the best thing I find is to smack a horsefly and leave a wasp or hornet to do its thing and buzz off on its own accord.

Next we went up to a building that we knew as a hotel but had the windows and doors nailed shut. On our previous visit we had given up trying to enter, however, as we had come to discover, every building had a way in, and sure enough around the back nature had destroyed the walls into three rooms. In we went and entered the hotel. The stairs were still strong enough to support our weight and we were able to explore the whole building from each room to the bath, to the mess hall and kitchen. This place was more recently abandoned. I found a laser disk on the floor and karaoke song books from 1999 and 2000. There was a room full of books that looked old by the covers but the inner pages were still in pristine condition. In one room upstairs – a more luxurious though still small room – we found a Japanese doll in a glass case. Such a doll might sell for a few hundred dollars in the store but we were abiding by the unwritten rules this time: explorers of abandoned sites take nothing but photos so that other explorers can find things in the same condition.

While we were exploring that building a small pick-up truck stopped by the chain closing off access by car and someone got out and unlocked it. As the truck drove past the building we ducked down. Quietly we walked into the kitchen and listened for voices or foot steps outside. Signs everywhere outside proclaimed forbidden entrance. Probably the worst that could happen was that we would be asked to leave but still we preferred not to be caught intruding. At last the truck left again. Later we walked up a narrow path and found a Buddhist tombstone where fresh flowers had been placed and freshly burned incense still smouldered. We guessed the men in the truck had come to pay respects to a former acquaintance with which they had worked when the mine and town were still open. It was after all the O-Bon holiday week when people are supposed to visit the graves of family and sometimes former friends.

We later explored a separate bath house which was really clean inside, and an old workshop where the biggest wasp/hornet I have ever seen took off slowly with a heavy droning. It flew near me and must have been nearly five centimetres long and with the rest of the body in proportionate size. Even I didn’t want a run in with that one!

Our last stop as the light was fading was the school buildings. Here my camera battery died unfortunately. We found classrooms with books, old classroom furniture, abandoned art projects and even English flash cards. The music room and auditorium was piled with books, maps, flash cards, photos, records of children’s songs, and lots of other assorted items. It was like half the items in the school had just been heaped in one half of the room. Here the most recent item was a book from 1980. Chalkboards in the classrooms had been written on by many visitors including some foreigners and the most recent visitor had come in May of this year.

The first floor classrooms were filled with many cases of small pieces of mining equipment, suggesting that after the school had closed the nearby mine had brought unnecessary things there to store. One room was filled with long, narrow and flat wooden cases, each containing drill core samples of quartz sand. I estimated that there were about 400 such cases there. It was getting darker and darker as the sun had set behind the mountains and clouds and we could hardly see as we explored the last of the rooms. We knew that we would have to go back again to visit the school buildings for more photographs.

By now there is little that we haven’t seen, few buildings we haven’t found our way into. Each time we looked in somewhere I though back to the most recent date I could find on a calendar or periodical and tried to imagine the place as it was when people were working there, and I wondered what went through their minds when they walked out of those rooms for the last time. How did the last graduating class of the school feel knowing that no more children would celebrate their final school year there? Why did some people feel they had to just throw all their remaining possessions and work items in a heap while others felt they should tidy things up a bit? Mostly I wondered about the doctor who left all the jars of body parts and the jar with the brain. Did he ever think that someday this abandoned mining town would become an underground tourist attraction and that someday the brain he left behind would find its way into a forum for photographs that would be shared the world over?