I work with Alice X a lot, because she’s totally awesome. When we both ended up in Japan at the same time we couldn’t not find an abandoned apartment building and take some photos, right?
This small town is known for its hotsprings, but it hasn’t been popular since the eighties. Some people are still clinging to a weird sort of existence right next to emptiness and decay. The apartment next to this one appeared to be occupied.
Here’s a 360° panorama of a set of stairs, outside one of the apartments. Those stairs were ridiculously steep, much steeper than they look! And despite the overgrowth, they were in active use. Someone walked up them, past us while we were shooting.
The next image kills me. It’s a bit out of focus – the camera really didn’t like focusing on the dark Alice in front of the bright window.
Hey, let’s go to a foreign country, where we don’t speak the language and can’t talk our way out of trouble, and let’s get naked and crawl around on a rooftop. Great plan! Totally aces.
Japan is weird. Because of the climate things tend to decay very quickly, and my sense of timeframe for a building that’s falling apart is completely broken. Like, they don’t use line trimmers (weed eaters, whipper snippers) with strings in the heads like most people use in their yards. They attach solid metal sawblades and they savagely maul the plants that have come to reclaim the land. Nature wants her space back, and she works fast in Japan.
This apartment was old, but how old I couldn’t tell. The last tenant might have moved out twenty years ago. Or three.
This is the sort of fantastic location I wish I had access to more often. It’s so Japanese, and it’s so decay.
Check out this 360° view, inside one of the empty apartments we found.
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Pointe with bare feet. She must have a frighteningly high pain threshold. Beautiful work as always