Inside an Abandoned Japanese Village with @Abroad in Japan & @Tokyo Lens

hey guys out once again in yet another abandoned village this one being out in the area of fukushima and this one having a bit of a guest so i've been working on my house recently as you can see my house you know it's not everyone's liking i've been working on it for 12 months and yeah come on in come have a look cribs mtv's cribs so sometimes i like to just sit here in the dark in the filth and just think about life really think about how how much better abroad japan is than in tokyo [Laughter] it's good that you have pets though and you know i know how much you love cats that one there what's his name does he have a name frederick frederick frederick the cat kind of looks like a marcus but we'll go with frederick that's fine and because these are shot on action cameras you're not gonna get a whole ton of detail inside and we're most certainly not going to be actually going i mean i'm showing my life it's doing nothing look at the way it's buckling here like there's nothing yeah i'm really glad we're standing right beneath the roof that's going to come down it's raining pretty hard like the water could bring the whole thing down so this particular village again is out in the area of fukushima and chris was really excited because before this village shut down the emperor came out to visit this place yeah so i i mean as you probably know there's so many cures so many abandoned buildings in japan and they sort of left their own devices people leave or pass away and then they're left behind and i think this town has been here since the 1970s it's been abandoned in the 1920s there are about 200 people living here right yeah so if we were to do like a little synopsis a little like i guess rundown of this place it was i think the peak of it was 1935 with 43 families and 266 residents the depopulation started right after world war ii around 1955 entirely abandoned in 1979 uh it's called otaki or odaki right and and you know if this were a normal town we wouldn't be able to get to it this little road will be overgrown it would be completely inaccessible but there's a reason the locals here keep this road clean there's a reason it's still accessible and open and that is because at some point in the 1920s or 30s i think the emperor right came here it must have been sometime in the 1920s i think because it's the it was the emperor before hiroshito so emperor came here you know had some fish and chips and some tea the cuisine of fukushima and uh and so they've kept that they've got a little monument here for the emperor and i think there's a there's a sense of pride here in the town of what's left of it for the people knowing that the emperor came here to this quiet little valley this quiet little slice of fukushima there's a there's a sense of pride there that's why they maintain the road and it's still accessible even though the building looks like could collapse in the next four maybe five minutes we coming in you can see i love the overgrown ivy and whatnot this is not safe to walk through here we go you've got the old cart here old ladders but as chris and i were driving into this area a car came down from this side of the road and we looked on the map it seemed like there was a connecting road and we drove up there around the corner yeah we drove around the corner i was like oh it must the road the road must come out somewhere we're down the corner and the road is stopped by a massive log and lots of debris and so either it was a ghost car or they went up there and turned around i'm going with ghost car feels like the more plausible of the two really it was a 1920s 1920s ford that was what was it was it was like it was like a 25th something yes but this looks really cool it's like um they've used some sort of it's not concrete is it it's like no something that goes beyond wood like if you look you can actually see the the base structure of the building here and the corner structure is all made out of old bamboo the rope tied through to all the bamboo lining going through like that right there that's bamboo and then all in here you've got that i guess hay and mud which was used to build the walls of this place it's just bamboo hay and mud so hey hey in my idea cornerstone of the take a lens explore channel there it is hay and mud so i think down the road just a little bit there were more buildings and there was a very surprisingly new looking shrine that i kind of wanted to take a peek at also cootie how do you say i can't remember chestnuts these are very very fresh chestnuts probably a lot of bears around they love them i'm actually surprised at this tank above all else this tank here is in amazing condition maybe because it's like protected below the straw roofs but there's next to no rusting whoever made this tank whatever company produces this tank i want to buy stock in their company because they make good stuff so let us hop back in the car for a second and go check out you can see the original straw roofing that's incredible wow we're gonna go check out an area that's just a little bit down the road [Applause] so this section here can we really call it a section this building if you will is the next section look at that much more overgrown it's crazy you think that was a house once now it's like an empty shell covered in rubbish the giant hole in the roof that makes it look like it's lit up from inside but it's not there are shoes and so much more and i don't like being under the roof but let's take a peek you can see clear through this would have actually been a really nice place to sit and enjoy the river at one point this wow would have been a really beautiful space chris come check this out oh yeah aside from the like this room here just sitting and overlooking the river i feel so inspired maybe having a song if the atmosphere is ever ruined you just you come somewhere like this you get inspiration i come here when i write my music my award-winning grammy award-winning music i kind of plays like this and then this just happens you know let's go this way oh okay and we're 100 not going up them but there is a set of stairs here that leads to the area with no roof and coming back out can i get out this way i'm not gonna try yeah the spider went one thing you gotta be mindful of there were some signs saying be wary of radiation because although we're i think 150 kilometers from the daiichi facility maybe less than that when there was the explosion that went into the clouds and whatnot but a lot of the wind carried it into this direction into the mountains um obviously it's probably been washed away a lot of it now but some of the soil probably has higher radiation levels than you'd get in their sort of normal background radiation levels so just don't eat the plants don't eat the leaves i won't be eating any leaves yeah the hobby it's good to have hobbies you can actually see the river down here and a lot of the the signs that chris was talking about was saying do not fish from this river specifically for those reasons but you'll also notice there's a ton of garbage or as chris would say rubbish down there and another sign that you'll see in an area like this is saying please don't come to these areas to dump your road fish your garbage because like with many countries japan has an issue with people going out to the countryside to dump one simple push that's the end of the token let's check out what is in here oh that door was pretty stuck it is just it is just a single tatami again overlooking the river this must have been a really beautiful spot before all of this was abandoned and just disposed of and ruined [Music] [Laughter] the atmosphere all right so here we have the mountain god shrine and it looks like the torii gate up here is actually freshly painted i'll shall i say the line i always say when i come somewhere like this it's like hi i'm here zach you know that spiritually white actually it's a really uh really nice shrine yeah uh kind of yeah very brand new it actually says here i think it was built last tuesday it was built last tuesday uh oh i think 20 2015 yeah oh no hey huh they say you're what year is that that's actually not that new that was like four years ago maybe it's just oh god it's a big spider is there oh wow don't walk through the truck oh i don't know if you guys it's all that big but like it's just like the net takes over you caught that [Laughter] i would not have seen that i would have walked clear through it and then that spider would have been crawling on me as always i think a lot of spiders end up taking rides with me on these trips they end up in the car we go for a drive the rain has started this is we're kind of rolling the dice with the weather today and it's not as bad as it could be so this is the whole shrine right here it is really really new like human look how clean this concrete is that was a spider web as well and this is the old ducky mountain god shrine so you want a screenshot right there and read that in your leisure there it is in beautiful 4k it's a good little bit of jlptm1 practice there for reading [Laughter] no let's go further into the uh into the valley up into the town sounds good just gonna head back down and then drive down just a little more into the town as chris brushes spider webs and leaves and random things that are for some reason stuck to him off we will walk down this way so this section here wow that is how you doing bud this section here appears to have previously been a soba shop i've got signs up saying that unrelated persons please stay out you quite literally couldn't pay me to go inside of there try to look up this it says hmm means memory hanaflower scooty making yeah memory flower memory flower am i getting that right that is good isn't it die something something water oh this is oh my god he's that spider yeah as a daddy long legs this is the town name here uh otaki or odaki right wow there we go and this is what it looked like inside the shop you can see the kitchen down there the kakseki seats and whatnot here and then as we drive through this area it's got a ton of little bridges and everyone is sketchier than the one before and chris has been convinced that we're going to die driving over these bridges that was a bit yeah it was a bit scary this isn't even the worst one one of the worst ones is actually up in that direction and we just can't walk through there this is a really cool angle you've got like the river what's incredible is this building is is just held up by like two pieces of wood yeah over the edge of like a ravine and it stood there you know 20 30 years still intact incredible really i think it's just sad to think this used to be a road that people would come down look at the metal they just so this area they built the major road that kind of cut outside of this yeah and it was i guess one of the contributing factors they just did oh yeah it would have directed all the traffic around here right so this is quite a common scene in the countryside you know they get these brand new roads these highways and that takes all the traffic away from little communities like this thus nobody comes to the sober restaurant or whatever it is they go out of business and that's something that's quite common in the countryside around here i find in tohoku in particular um yeah it's kind of sad but it's just the way it is right progress capitalism we all love it don't we capitalism shall we hike up and show the beautiful waterfall [Music] so as we drove along here the entire area is basically just a forested area just like this running along the side of a river in fact if you are looking for abandoned villages on google maps and whatnot especially when traveling through japan since not all of them will be marked what you're going to want to do is find yourself a narrow path that leads off towards a river and then more often not that road will end on google maps but if you zoom in and look through you'll actually see markings for buildings more often than not and it's because a lot of these old villages as with pretty much anywhere else in the world are built along rivers and waterways and so as we were there's another is that the same car oh i don't know ghost car we keep having like mystery ghost cars just come through and turn around and then disappear we've probably had at least three to four ghost cars just kind of disappear along the way yeah yeah and as we were driving in here chris is like oh this beautiful waterfall off there to the side and then we got a bit of a a closer peek at the beater butter waterfall the beer waterfall that's kind of watercolor and you can tell that some of the buildings that used to be here have already been disassembled taken down removed but because building removal can be quite an expensive process it's one of the things that leads to a lot of these places inevitably being abandoned and left as they are i don't know how close i'm gonna be able to get to the waterfall give the lens a wipe there we go right not gonna be able to see it from this angle i gotta go in good luck i knew i knew chris was not gonna be coming with me oh wow that is a huge spiderweb okay cool bye-bye it's been a good time it's on surface looks like a really nice waterfall until and i don't know if you're going to be able to see this you look up and you notice it's just coming out of a big black industrial pipe seems like this was rerouted from somewhere else a slightly man-made waterfall all right chris i've survived kind of were there any more houses along the village i don't remember neither do i well let's head back jump in the car drive down the road a little more and see if there's anything left to this little abandoned village i warned you this is what happened if i came on the tokyo lens explorer sick beats i've never used the word sick again i hate the way the word sick has come to me good goodbye i've got i've got quite a visual imagination when somebody says that's sick i literally picture someone going that's what happens when you're 31. i i don't connect with the youth today if you're a viewer who's 18 or under i don't know who you are what you do or why you are or why oh wow is that like an abandoned bus up there what is that what is that how do we get up there okay there's gotta be a way up there oh this looks like chris has just left me behind everyone leaves me behind when i go oh wow that's pretty cool i don't even know what kind of bus that is that's almost hippie bust level and it has just been taken back oh wow stop here for a second grab one or two photos because it's the kind of place you need to have photos of whoo and now we will see if we can make our way back down hopefully without falling and dying or having anything fall on us all right so off in the distance i can already see chris scurrying to the car and looking back i gotta get back there before before he leaves without me that bus was actually pretty cool all right let's head down the road a bit what we got we've got a set of golf clubs we've got a telephone kenwood good brown let's take a look again with telephone stuff here to my apartment some kind of pump people really just do come out here to drop their trash wow and now so that is the new road that got built through that kind of circumvented this road just got rid of the need to use it and now for the hyper exciting reveal of the final building of this village when you look at the word excitement in the dictionary you'll just see this video and that house that's it right there this one looks like it was probably again a uh a shop of some sort yeah yeah this town here is was originally an old like or post town here in japan and a little bit different from the post sounds like mago meijuku and sumagojuku and all of those there's the purpose of the post town it's just to be a stopping off point on a mountain journey they there's so if you take a look at for example the english word post town it was based off of towns that had major post offices whereas in japan more often than not they were stop off places for samurai along the way i've actually never dived deep dived deep dived into the history of post towns themselves and considering how many i've been to over the past year or two yeah i'm now just wanting to do a personal deep dive into i want to see you i want to see you do a deep dive there's always really useful information about each post town and post towns in general what not that comes up in the comments section and it's given me a lot of starting points so and then everything back here is just overgrown come on shoes your shoes are just ruined these shoes are brand new three years ago so with that being said that is the abandoned village here in fukushima what did you think chris is that everything you ever dreamed it would be and more and more that's right i i kind of like these places in the rain because there's a lot of mosquitoes mosquitoes tend to disappear so yeah it's a cool little place it's always kind of moving to come these little run down villages and towns right think what might have been think of the 200 people that lived here playing having fun and then just seeing it look like that it's uh it's pretty cool yes teaches you about the passenger time it does they think about what's important in life by subscribing to abroad in japan most importantly the important things i'll link a little bit of a playlist at the end of this video that's great plugging your own videos it's terrible in a tokyo lens explorer you want to see more about abandoned villages in japan maybe a fun joke video between chris and i and then a deep dive into the area i will link those for you uh if you haven't already which you probably have make sure you go subscribe to abroad and jam and abroad especially uh devoted to jam both international local jam strawberry jam raspberry jam all the jams roaring and jam check it out guys thanks for having me norm all right i say thanks for having me i drove you here in my car and we'll see you again sort of thing you get on abroad you

Channel: Tokyo Lens Explore

Views: 186,009

Rating: 4.9545918 out of 5

Keywords: Japan, Japanese, Livestream, Japan live, Tokyo Lens, Tokyo Lens Explore, Norm Tokyo Lens, abandoned, abandoned japan, japanese village, explore japan, Japan travel, abroad in japan, abroad in japan fukushima, abroad in a lens, abroad in japan tokyo lens, chris broad, abandoned village, abandoned village in japan, abandoned japanese village

Id: YFxi5TGJmhc

Length: 27min 30sec (1650 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 14 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Toffeenutlatte912]

Chris could have a legit side-hustle beatboxing to his “sick beats”..bring on Natsuki on guitar and Joey on vocals and we could have a band on our hands 👏

[u/Kuwabaraa]

Norm is so damn cool, I watched JAJ and didn't even realize he had his own channel and was on two of the trips with Chris. His camera and production work is on par with Chris I am super glad they are friends. Their late night drinking stream from last week was hilarious too.

[u/FahrenheitNight]

I loved watching this video last night. Have been extremely fascinated by the abandoned villages in Japan. A lot of them and the areas they are in remind me of the village in Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water.