I Spent a Day at an Abandoned Japanese School | What Happened Here?

or abandoned buildings are a commonly known and documented element of urban exploration here in japan with the younger demographic moving away from rural areas to the bigger cities the number of abandoned homes and facilities seem to be rising every year in 2018 japan's housing and land survey found that 13 percent of all homes in japan were unoccupied even in a big city like tokyo one in every 10 homes are abandoned but tokyo doesn't just consist of large metropolitan areas like shinjuku shibuya and akihabara in the far western outskirts of tokyo lies oktama a mountainous stretch of greenery enveloping small villages homes and buildings in a shroud of green wonder with the main city holding a small population of less than 5 000 people it's getting more difficult every year for a younger community to thrive and one glaring piece of evidence of this fact is the existence of abandoned schools or haikou today i decided to venture out into the outskirts of tokyo to explore one such abandoned school to get a sense and vibe of what these amazing architectural fossils have to offer to visitors and explorers ogochi shotsugako was founded in the 1970s as a combined elementary and middle school later merging with hikawa elementary and hikawa middle school in march of 2004 due to a decreasing number of students living in the local area the school sits atop a steep hill overlooking oktama lake built up of a single two-story building connected to a large gymnasium other facilities like this school pool have been inaccessible for decades and locals of the area still use this building for certain curricular activities but no longer are the hallways filled with the playful laughter of young kids and teachers all that remains is the melancholic creaks of the decrepit wooden floors and the piercing screeches of the cicadas outside signaling the end of another japanese summer oh immediate like wooden like kind of old not really rotting but what's the word for it like a really fragrant old wood smell the kind that's actually quite pleasant it reminds me almost of my grandma's place so this is the entrance to the school as you can see all the classrooms lead to this front entrance the students would come in here you will take off your shoes here first of all because in japanese schools it's all about the outside shoes being part of the outside but when you're in the school building you wear these things called uwabaki so this is considered dosoku and you change into obviously because school is no longer there anymore we have these like really jesus dilapidated slippers how old are these goddamn slippers dude so this school again i believe had all the way from the first grade all the way up until the ninth grade so i got i don't even know how many kids would be in each year because i mean look at the number of shoe boxes that's barely any i can maybe count a little over a hundred maybe so that's like what 10 students per year that's really freaking small and i guess this is all the shoeboxes for all of the uh teachers oh there's even the the vice principal and even the uh the main principal already there's stuff inside of it it's pretty empty oh actually the principal shoes right there my man was wearing uggs some nice shoes [Music] and of course every good school needs to have a piano oh it's an organ oh look at that oh yeah because there's the foot pedals down there as well geez i wonder if you can it turn does not turn off god how old would this thing be this thing looks freaking ancient i wonder what this was useful maybe you know one of the teachers would come in and play a tune as the students would come into school maybe at the end of school i have no freaking idea so right now we're on the first floor um there's a couple of classrooms here as well as some uh like student lobbies and teacher lobbies is that not the coolest looking shot down there wow just hear absolutely nothing right now it's the middle of the day all you can hear is the cicadas outside really giving off like a summer end of summer type of vibe it's hard to imagine that there were probably tens of maybe even possibly hundreds of students just filling up these hallways during this time of day because right now it is one p.m uh on a weekday it's scary to think now that there's just no sound at all only the sounds of my creaking on this very creaky floorboard hallway i don't know what to feel you know this like this feeling of like emptiness but also this feeling of like mystery happening right now it's kind of surrounded by a whole lot of nothing it's been kind of left in time these kinds of settings are nothing new to me as someone who's consumed japanese media my whole life corpse party school live and countless other pieces of japanese media have used the concept of abandoned schools to differing results but standing in one physically even in the middle of the day brought all sorts of emotions into me at that moment many of which were definitely unexplainable right here which is the student or teacher lobby i guess unfortunately this is locked so we can only peer inside it really is just kind of forgotten in times and [Music] everything's just frozen it looks like it's still being used though because again like this building is no longer used as a school facility but the locals still use it for all sorts of like community driven activities so i think some kind of like i guess like book club happens here but i can still see kind of remnants of where the teachers would kind of sit around and you know do their teacherly duties i've also noticed as well you can very easily tell that this is an old building just by looking at the height of these doors like i'm not exactly like a tall person i'm six foot on the dot but this is like i'm literally the size of this door frame the average height was a lot shorter so this was probably a good height for them but this that's how you can usually tell the oldness of a building on how high up the door frames are hit my head on this of course with every cultural slice of architecture came its own unique set pieces so here's a rather unique thing i feel about japanese schools again she goes to show how old the school is this is a ichiri which means a unicycle grading board i don't know why this is a japanese school thing for some reason japanese schools especially elementary schools and probably up to middle schools they're really inclined on teaching students how to ride a unicycle don't ask me why that's just a thing that's been tradition in japanese schools for hundreds of years now and this is essentially a board that shows which students have gone to the next grade of unicef obviously there's multiple grade levels in unicycling and this is where they show which students have gone i assume from first second third to the top level again it's just really weird there's i i don't know the reasoning behind why japanese students are kind of forced to ride a unicycle it's japan and clowns are the only two types of places and people that they teach you how to ride a unicycle i guess it was a really important part of the curriculum so much so that they had to show it off to the rest of the school i guess this is not so much use for the students it's useful for the guests and the teachers and i think we can go in oh my god these these door frames it's so small so that's the gentleman's bathroom right here and behind me is the ladies bathroom i still don't know to this day how the hell you use this kind of toilet like taking a pee is all right in something like this but you know doing the number two like how do you even do that oh you can really hear the cicadas out here and normally i wouldn't be allowed but let's go into the ladies bathroom [Music] well what the hell the ladies bathroom gets so much more of a nicer toilet you know one that you can actually sit on is that the sink look at the size of that thing dude first of all it's literally up to my knee height but it's kind of like that that's the size of my hand in comparison i dare anyone to find a sink that is small or not remnants of ancient technology old wooden carvings from past students and other deteriorating objects forgotten in time were scattered all through the first floor reminding visitors of a time long gone leaving the dark and damp first floor we proceeded upstairs to the second floor to get a better sense of the building we were exploring what creek you're up here oh it's so much warmer whoa look at that oh my god that's so cool when the sunlight comes in it really does give off a different vibe so there's a lot more open classrooms up here obviously there's a whole open window so you can see out and uh because of that the heat is definitely a lot more prominent in here but let's start all the way at the end which i believe is the music room [Music] oh it's very equity so this is the music room with the lack of instruments in this room it doesn't really feel like a music look at these tiny seats dude look at that just sit like this actually i can see some like uh like test tube valves and stuff like that obviously the blackboard right there with the five lines is definitely used for music i would know as a musician myself something like that music i think this might have also been used as maybe just like a standalone science room as well ah that's like test tubes in here as well 200 millimeter pyrex i don't want to smell the inside of this because that i don't know what kind of like chemical residue is left inside of these i don't know when these were used last so i'm not i'm gonna leave them there it kind of has the remnants of just everything obviously you know it screams the musical and you've got some drumsticks here it's test tube holders here for bots and builders i remember using these in school as well yeah it's so goddamn humid up here like i'm pretty sure you can see it in my face i'm like sweating a million times harder than i was downstairs i feel and look disgusting right now i'm sorry but you know what this is how hot it would have been back in the day because i see nowhere for an air conditioning unit and just remembering how old this school was there would be no air conditioning units in here it would just be maybe fans maybe or the kids would literally just have to live in this heat for you know six to seven hours a day which would be [ __ ] brutal i was about to say where is the piano because i think no matter how old of a school it is any good music room would have a piano normally there would be one right up next to the blackboard because the teacher would be playing along with it teaching the students music but i see that there's no piano over there so i thought where the hell is the piano that's a goddamn piano that is the tiniest piano i've ever seen does this thing work it doesn't big sad i don't even want to think about how old this piano is but hey i'm pretty sure this is what the teacher was using to teach the students music you know the floor is creaking a lot and then you realize that there's just a giant hole in the floor as well you know no biggie no not not a health hazard at all we are on the second floor mind you so this could potentially lead to some like corpse party [ __ ] of just like falling down into the first floor yeah i'm not too keen about that of course the next room i had to set foot in was the one room that i think every japan enthusiast no matter how large or small would instantly recognize in the classroom the fabled japanese school classroom now this is truly lost in time everything has just been placed where it was where it would be like this classroom was just used yesterday kind of creepy to think that this place has been like this frozen in time for the past at least five years little lockers for each of the students that's actually a pretty decent size honestly and then we have oh my god that's how you know it's an old japanese school it's an abacus some of you younger kids watching this video might not know what this is before the calculator was invented kids use this this is a this is a manual calculator yeah i don't know how to use this either to be honest i'm with you kids so this is the back whiteboard right here obviously it gives you basically a timeline of the things to do oh there's a list of all the classes that happen on which period and what day you don't have a class like that anymore and then on saturdays as well because japanese schools all japanese use schools and used to be six days a week instead of five days a week can you imagine and then i've almost landed on my foot alright class we're going to be learning about why you should subscribe to this channel smash the like button hit that notification bell you feel me boys i want you guys to do that right freaking now even this teacher's desk is really low like this is like the height you would normally maybe sit at but there's no chair anywhere so the teacher would literally just be like maybe this tall i don't know am i just tall i don't even know anymore but i want to fulfill a weave dream right now that that one dream that i think every kid who grew up with japanese anime wishes they could be in the position of do you know what this is ladies and gentlemen this is the protagonist scene back of the class next to the window staring out as he contemplates how to save the world or some [ __ ] i don't know honestly in a real life scenario especially in today's weather this is the one scene i would not see because it's right next to the window this is the heat source this is where all of the hot heat is coming in as you can see i'm sweating like a [ __ ] right now because it's like 30 something degrees man i really do feel like the protagonist to this video right now god damn i could save the wall what i want let's just continue on with the tool so this is something cool i found in another classroom and this is a mural that was painted of this school uh so that's 1977. oh my god i was like 45 years ago and uh as you can see from this mural not much has changed the school looks literally the exact same apparently there's a pool over on the side there which i didn't see so i guess there's a secret pool somewhere to the side over there that is just completely inaccessible because compared to this mural the school right now today is uh very overgrown um but other than that yeah everything looks pretty much the same that's that's kind of astounding as much as the classrooms gave off a rather vintage rustic vibe there was one element in the hallway that would really give us all a temporal whiplash for the ages so here's another thing that is very i guess was common in old japanese schools is these sinks in the hallways we're on the second floor hallway obviously and there's a couple of these actually along this hallway obviously because it's abandoned water's not running unfortunately so i can't drive myself in this heat but these sinks were used for a number of reasons um obviously we have the music uh classroom right there which i believe was also the science room as well so you know maybe after some scientific experiments you've got your hands dirty kids will come here wash their hands you know maybe after they were done playing outside and before they would jump back into the classroom they would come in wash their hands i just noticed there's this like weird electrical wiring right here that is connected to this cap that goes over these uh these valves there's a number of theorems as to why this could be here and what this is one is maybe because this doesn't look like it's connected to any kind of like heat tank or anything so this honestly might have been like a thing to warm up the valve to either produce hot water or perhaps because we are in the middle of the mountains in oktober it gets very cold here during the winter so maybe this thing was used to keep the pipes warm so that it doesn't freeze over and stop the water from coming out either way that really goes to show how old this place is using this kind of like old-school technology to make the most out of life that's really neat although we couldn't explore every classroom in the building due to strict health and safety regulations laid out by the local government of okutama the sheer silence and stillness of the entire building was more than enough to give me these strange feelings of f morality and melancholy only the loud creaks of the floorboards providing any sign of life but of course there was one other building left to explore one that was essential to any japanese school abandoned or not all right coming out onto the second floor we've got a little sky hallway what do you call these i call these sky hallways that lead to the massive gymnasium that is next to the main school building there's also an entry way down on the first floor as well but since we ended up on the second floor figured why not take the scenic route looking out over there so this is where the kids would come out and do some sports i guess i don't know how big this gymnasium this this building is actually quite massive so i'm assuming this gym is going to be quite big but the entrance is right over here it also leads to some kind of uh apartment building or something over there i don't know what that is i don't know if that's part of the school or just something else let's see inside the gymnasium whoa this is huge [Music] jesus christ this place is huge dude holy crap okay so normally right with these kinds of like gymnasiums this is where they would you know at the beginning of the term or at the end of the term during graduation stuff like that this is where they would do the ceremonies right like the kids would all be standing here listening to the principal um i doubt there were this many kids at this school to warrant a gym this large i mean you can hear the echo that's so loud we got b-ball let's play some b-ball oh that's so loud if i get this shot in you have to smash like right now this is like the kind of like ropes that you see in like american gyms right like the the gym class where you have to like climb up on the ropes as high as possible i hope they at least put like a mat down on this because otherwise this would be really really freaking dangerous i reckon that's a good maybe 10 meters up at least that'd be terrifying and of course we didn't have a regular piano in the music room but of course in the gymnasium we have a goddamn grand piano why did they not have this in the music room huh oh there's a very old piano it still works [Music] so obviously they would use this grand piano to play you know the school anthem maybe even the national anthem during ceremonies and stuff like that so i feel yet again this is another very unique thing about japanese schools is that up here we have the lyrics to the school anthem i don't know about other schools around the country my school in australia didn't have anything like this this is the lyrics to the japanese i guess the elementary school school song and then over there there is the one to the middle school school song i don't know why it's different i don't know why i can't just be the same song ladies and gentlemen the weeknd so if you guys have seen your handful of anime based in schools middle schools high schools then this scene is probably already familiar to you this is where there'd be the the school play arc where the the principal would do his speech during graduation all that kind of stuff you you've seen them before but seeing it in reality is definitely a lot more grandiose i mean and i mean i'm pretty sure this isn't even like a big gymnasium either especially compared to some of the other gymnasiums in some other bigger schools out there but still like considering the fact that this school probably had maybe you know 100 students max and yet this massive of a gymnasium exists right next to it is pretty astounding i definitely feel again that this room especially really shows off kind of the emptiness of the entire school just like there's nothing more than like a big echoey space where you can only hear your voice and nothing else really is somewhat ominous if the school building didn't give me enough of a sense of melancholy the gymnasium definitely did and it's almost hard to explain why perhaps it's because this building really does mark a number of very important beginnings and ends for japanese students perhaps this was the last place all the students gathered to mark the end of this school's life some 15 odd years ago imagining a scene like that taking place here definitely made me stop to appreciate this environment even more well guys i hope you enjoyed this little tour of an abandoned school in the mountains of japan big big thank you to the town folks of oktober for letting me film at ogochisocho this was a really really cool experience i've never really been to any kind of abandoned school in japan and this was a video that i've been wanting to do for a very very long time so i'm glad i got to show it to you guys and really uh you know get to enjoy an experience and appreciate i guess the not only the architecture but also just this weird sense of nostalgia that i get this weird sense of memory i never really grew up in an environment like this and i don't think a lot of you guys watching really grow up in environment like this but something about an abandoned school like this in the mountains of japan really gives off that strong sense of nostalgia that i really enjoy if you guys do enjoy this video i'll be able to do my other dream video which is to film in a non-abandoned japanese school if you guys would like that then hey leave a like on this video make sure to subscribe i think what i'm gonna take away from this experience is the fact that you know time is really just i guess a fleeting thing and it really does go to show in old architecture like this and i think that's uh something that is very special and memorable anyways guys thanks for watching and i'll see in the next one [Music] this

Channel: The Anime Man

Views: 996,771

Keywords: anime, manga, theanimeman, reviews, discussions, music, let's, play, walkthrough, playthrough, funny, moments, epic, fail, commentary, live, reaction, Japan, Japanese, The Anime Man, thean1meman, Spent, Day, Abandoned, School, explore, Okutama, elementary, haunted

Id: 9XAM1LbuHAA

Length: 25min 15sec (1515 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 14 2021