Nara Dreamland is the epitome of many haikyo dreams; an abandoned theme park with all its roller-coasters and rides still standing. On Maya mountain in central Japan there`s an old hotel famous in the haikyo scene for one particular setting- a silent corner room with floor-to-ceiling windows.

Izu’s Jungle Park is an immense abandoned green house, an indoor botanical garden sheltering nearly 10,000 square meters worth of sweltering tropical habitat. Jungle Park was easily the biggest green-house I’ve ever been in, and boy was it hot inside. H-O-T. And very humid. Within minutes I was soaked to the skin, and any time I had to climb something I was panting with the exertion

Across the road from Jungle Park was this smashed-up restaurant/souvenir shop. I`ll guess it wasn’t actually connected to the theme park, though it probably survived on the tourists who came there. Here’s a haikyo I chanced upon almost a year ago in Izu, while haikyoing with Mike. It`s not particularly awesome in any way, it just has some nice peeling red and white paint, and a cool Coke fridge.

The Gan Kutsu Cliff Face Hotel in Saitama is the relic of a dream, one man’s vision to carve out a massive hotel in the sheer rock face, working alone with only a chisel for 21 years until the day he died in 1925. Takahashi Minekichi was a rural Japanese strawberry farmer with a vision. For 21 years he carved the beginnings of a grand hotel into the solid rock wall of a cliff face on his land, digging out the contours only he could see.

The Saurabol resort hotel was never completed, abandoned 10 years ago when construction funds ran dry. The Hanultari resort hotel was never completed, abandoned along with numerous half-built schools as Jeju`s promise never panned out.

The abandoned US Air Force (USAF) base in Fuchu is a vine-slathered memento from the early days of Japanese/American peace. Its huge twin parabolic dishes are still visible from the exterior- though now half-eaten up by the passing decades, rusted red and bobbing like hole-riddled yachts on the sea of green jungle. The abandoned US Air Force (USAF) base in Tachikawa is a bramble-choked memento from the early days of Japanese/American peace. Its three huge chimneys are still visible from the exterior, brick-red and lined up like masts on a rudderless ship, slowly sinking deeper into the smothering sea of green jungle.

Camp Drake was a joint US Army/Air Force base in Saitama, active until the 1970`s. It contained a hospital which handled troops coming out of Vietnam and also a communications array. No, not the game. This particular Monkey Island (‘Sarushima’ in Japanese) is located off the coast of Yokosuka near the mouth of Tokyo Bay, and during World War II served as an artillery battery and first point of defense of the Japanese homeland.

The Kawaminami shipyard was opened in 1936 and went bankrupt in 1955. Through the war years it served as both a munitions factory, a drydock for construction of cargo ships, escort ships, and kaitens, and possibly also as a POW slave labor camp At 8:15 on August 6 1945 the first nuclear bomb in the history of warfare detonated over Hiroshima, obliterating the city within a 1.5 mile radius and killing outright some 80,000 people, with around another 70,000 dying of radiation and burns by the end of the year.

The Nakagin Capsule Hotel Tower in Shimbashi was the first of its kind in the world; a wholly modular building comprised of a concrete stack with latch-points for pre-fabricated one-piece rooms to bolt on to. The New Sky Building in Shinjuku belongs to the stable of architecture known as Metabolism, a 1970’s movement in Japan to create utilitarian, utopian, bolt-on and off structures that can change and evolve as needed.

Ceramic Land is one of Japan`s grand failed theme parks, though one more resilient than its compadres. Located in a Kyushu town famous for its flowery gardens, it is still barely clinging to a tenuous thread of life. Towards the end of World War 2 the Japanese military created and employed the `kaiten`, a manned suicide torpedo designed to blow up American ships with great accuracy.