Ruins Trek - to the Nakagusuku Kogen Hotel

The Nakagusuku Kogen Hotel is one of the most infamous ruins in all of Japan, probably second only to the ruins on Hashima Island (also known as Gunkanjima - I went there several years ago). The hotel, which was built more like a small city than just a place to stay, was apparently planned to be made for the World Fair Expo '75 but was never completed because of financial difficulties.

I also read online that there was more to it than just that - that several workers died in accidents during construction and that people claimed to see ghosts throughout the duration of building. Not sure if the stories are true, but walking around the place you can definitely feel like there's more to it than just bare concrete and rotten walls.

So here are the pictures. Enjoy. And at the end I'll post a list of links to other sites with info and pictures.




Looking up you can just make out parts of the hotel.



The view (above) is from the ruins of Nakagusuku Castle, a world heritage site that is very cool in and of itself.



The entryway. If you do a 180 right here you can see a 15th century Okinawan castle. What an awful place to build this monstrosity.



Walking around the hotel on a path to the right of it. The hotel itself was built into the side of the mountain and varied in height between 1 and maybe 5 stories tall. And on the right side of the path are a number of secondary buildings. I would guess some would be suites or hotel management rooms, but the level of decay is so much you can't tell at all.



Notice the singer missile graffiti? That's about 15 feet off the ground.



A side entrance to the 1st floor.



Continue up the path and the vegetation gets more and more all-encompassing.





I love this rusted old vending machine.



Take a peek inside and you see bare walls now covered in graffiti.





Sometimes the left and right sides of the road are connected like this. What the hell were the designers thinking, anyway? You have so many styles mixed here it's hard to get a feel for what they were trying to say.

















All the broken glass everywhere and fallen pieces of ceiling, and the ocasional piece of rotting furniture screamed stay out.

There is something strangely special about the ruins we leave behind, whether used and lived in for centuries or (like this hotel) never touched until after their makers have given up on them. My gut says the place will be mostly swallowed up by the forest in another 20 years, but maybe not. Maybe they'll be rediscovered in the far future. I wonder if anyone will realize the place was never even finished.

The place was just huge, BTW (in case you didn't get that already). You could easily spend a day exploring and probably not see it all.

Some cool links with more pictures:

• Misuterareta: pics, some info, in English.
• Ryusuidou (龍水洞): a Japanese site about creepy haunted spots. There's a lot of cool galleries here to look at from all over Japan.
• A video log that's mainly a bunch of pics. Interestingly, in the three years since this video was taken you can see the hotel's fallen apart a lot, tho there seems to be a lot less vegetation now.

Look around online for Nakagusuku Hotel or in Japanese (中城ホテル) and you can find tons more pics.