Fascinating, but the photos were dissapointingly small. Keitai camera?

Jungle Park is not an early victim. There were a lot of ill-conveived theme parks opened during the bubble that crashed and burned before the demographic crunch even hit. I believe there are some other majestic ruins out there-I would love to visit some myself.

When taking the bus from Beijing to the Great Wall we passed a half-finished and abandoned copy of Disneyland, complete with an incomplete copy of Sleeping Beauty's castle. The developer had started it, and ran out of money before it was gone. I hope it still exists when I go back to the area, and that I can successfully bribe the watchman to let me inside for some exploration/photography.

I resized these to smaller sizes. I could offer you the larger ones, but we are not really pro cameramen to start with.

There were a lot of ill-conveived theme parks opened during the bubble that crashed and burned before the demographic crunch even hit.

Yeah, everyone seems to have forgotten about the "indoor ski resort." Hard to imagine that was ever profitable. I find the mediocre theme parks spread across Japan as an attempt to bring urbanites to the prefectures very sad in a mono no aware cast.

What's the deal with this type of stuff? Like yourself, we went to Ikaho a while back and it seemed like fully 30 or 40 percent of the buildings were abandoned and rusting. Is there just no money to be made tearing them down or what?

"Japan is just normalizing." Indeed: reversion to the mean. It's really quite instructive to compare Japan's bubble-era excesses with the housing bubble in the US. Credit-driven building mania before the big "pop", post-apocalyptic hulks littering the landscape after. (However, credit due to the enterprising Yanks: I'm sure many an abandoned mcmansion will be put to good use as a meth lab.)

Is there just no money to be made tearing them down or what?

Gotta be more expensive to tear them down than to just leave them as is. And nobody is itching to use the land. Sad thing about Ikaho is that a lot of commercial establishments are still operating from those rusty buildings. Kind of pathetic, but that's what happens when the government never lets the rural prefectures develop any industries and makes them dependent upon tourism and gov't handouts.

The indoor ski resort in Funabashi, Chiba Prefecture, finally reopened as Japan's first IKEA earlier this year.

In related news, Dubai, that burgeoning oasis of Middle Eastern development, boasts an indoor ski resort of its own, which was often mentioned in background reports around the time of the "Dubai Ports World" flap.

Two massive money pits, two very differently-funded economic booms.

Funabashi, Chiba Prefecture...

...smells like a horse stable.

I wasn't real clear there, sorry. I guess I'm just envisioning that the construction companies would also do demolition and could get the same kind of graft and pork to tear stuff down as to build it. Maybe just wishful thinking, I dunno. But yeah, in talking about Ikaho words like 'sad' and 'pathetic' are definitely appropriate.

And the worst part is that Ikaho is built in such a neat charming way - with everything built up vertically.

"Jungle Park" is also the name of CD-ROM from the mid-90s that Buffalo Daughter did the music for. I've kind of wanted to buy the soundtrack from it, but I think it's hard to get a copy of, in addition to expensive.

It's totally beautiful, I recommend it to anybody actually. And onsen is a worthy trip for sure.

I was in the funabashi ikea today, I had no idea it had a history! It's surrounded by empty plots of land and some very tall apartment towers.

By the way, it's not the first ikea in Japan. They came in when they were still green in the late seventies and got the bum rush. This predates them becoming cheap and creative.

I assume you're familiar with 廃墟デフレスパイラル? Intrepid camera-wielding bloke's voyage into the bowels of glorious wrecks throughout Japan. Thanks to Momus for the link, way back in the day.

I dreamt that Honshu was a giant cruise ship.

i think you meant "no-child-left-begat"...

Excellent work.

Very cool pictures. I visited that area earlier this year, but I didn't actually venture into the abandoned Jungle Park complex. Maybe I was still seasick from the horrid boat ride from Shimoda.

What I wonder is if any of the tropical plants have made it out of there and taken hold in the local ecosystem.

Adveture-seeker marxy in the postbubble-dungeon quest!

Godda love urban exploring. Very spooky.

I didn't actually venture into the abandoned Jungle Park complex.

I never would have. My wife's friends told us to check it out, saying "You can walk right in." We told her later we went into the actual greenhouses, and she said, "Whoa! I would have never done that." I felt set up.