Let's Enjoy Haikyo (Together With My Friends)!

Like many white female high school 12th graders in the early 2010s, I had a pinterest

account. And boy oh boy, did I pin. My pinterest was so active it board-ered on obscene (get it? because pinterest board? SNL producer Lorne Michaels, I know you're reading this, pls stop screening my calls and/or call me back).

This was my pinterest. You can clearly see by the sassy side-bangs in my profile picture that I haven't used Pinterest in a long time. I obviously deleted the pinterest chrome extension and freed myself from the hell-site long ago. Also in case you read the board titles and were wondering, only the cool boards were mine. My account was hacked and the hacker made a bunch of embarrassing boards. Promise rings who?

It was on Pinterest that I first became interested in urban exploration. One of the prettiest pins on my "Let's go ✈️" board was of an abandoned hotel called "Maya" in Kobe, Japan. It's straight-up gorgeous.

When I got accepted into the JET Programme in early 2018, I knew that haikyo (廃虚, ruins) would be a big part of my JET experience.

As it turns out, I was kinda wrong about that. At least, in the beginning.

The thing about JET - well, really any job in Japan - or anywhere, I guess. . . ok

The thing about life in general, is that getting arrested is bad. And getting arrested and then deported and then banned from a country you've been fascinated in since you were 6 and first started watching the anime Inuyasha with your Belarussian friend Natasha (and like not still for the same reasons, because unlike the baby weaboo you were in the past, now you're like an adult who appreciates fine things like traditional culture and noh and big tiddy anime girls)? Being on the no entry list? Knowing in your kokoro that you can never enter said country again? Double bad! Because how will you ever find a big tiddy anime girlfriend if you're banned from the country they come from? Pls don't doxx me I'm not actually racist thank.

I am someone whose single proudest achievement is never (having been caught) doing anything wrong ever in her life.*

*The only exception to this involved an alleged "death threat" to this asshole Kyle in the eighth grade and like, I was wearing an angelic pink sweater set that day so the new principal totally didn't believe I'd done it. And since I shoved the broken pencil shank down my pants so they wouldn't find it, and the scar it left on my thigh healed, I think it's safe to say there is absolutely zero evidence I would ever even think to do such a thing. Clearly, baseless slander.

I think my extreme aversion to consequence-bearing rule-breaking behaviour is understandable. But also, I think that being a stickler for the rules sucks if it's keeping you from doing the thing that sparks joy or whatever.

Nearing the end of my contract, I decided to throw caution to the wind. To be perfectly candid, I was feeling sad-horny and bemoaning the fact that the last action I'd seen was a faked orgasm with a Trump voter. I got drastic. That's right, I decided to re-open my Plenty of Fish dating profile for the first time in five years. And what did I see (besides the obviously horriffic selfies of a pre-"knows to fill in her eyebrows" me)? I discovered that I had entered 'urban exploration' as an interest. In truth I had completely forgotten it was even a thing. My ADHD brain mad dumb, y'all.

I set to work, frantically scrolling through obscure blogs to track down famous haikyo sites in Japan. I had whole-ass trips planned to Okinawa, Tokyo, Hakone, Saitama, Miyagi, Ibaraki, and the entirety of Tohoku. I was ready to see flowers, eat local delicacies, drink snake juice, enjoy traditional Japanese summer festivals, and hit up a fancy abandoned hotel or two.

Then corona-chan happened.

My workplace told us we're not allowed to leave the prefecture. And there are a few well-known haikyo places in the Hiroshima area, but then what? Am I supposed to just let the dream die? Nah, fam! It was time to roll up my sleeves and start learning the kanji for "novelty rocket ship rotating love hotel bed". Places to go, haikyo shit to google, pins to make (on google maps this time, not pinterest).

Why? Because while there's no shortage of abandoned buildings in inaka Japan, nobody has any clue where any of them are. Most Japanese haikyo are shrouded in mystery, and you have to do real sleuthing to find them. There's an important reason for this. If a ruin's location becomes public knowledge, many people will flock to the sites. Some of these people could end up vandalizing the property. True haikyo enthusiasts prove their dedication to the hobby by putting in the time and research. But random thrill-seekers are unpredictable. After my first few months of haikyo, I'm inclined to agree. I've seen some messed up and frankly sad damage to the interiors of buildings that I've visited. Including buildings that appear picture-perfect in early blog posts- posts that have been retroactively edited to remove major location hints.

The majority of the blogs and message boards I've visited have made one thing clear: they had to put in major time and effort to find their haikyo, and so will anybody who tries to follow in their footsteps. I'm going to be taking a page out of their books. I won't spill the beans on location, but I don't mind passing on the clues I read that helped me along the way. I'll even post them in English, for those of you who don't read Japanese (aren't I nice?). For anyone who is really interested in tracking down haikyo, I'm sure the challenge of getting there will make the 'find' (or the 'near find but actually I have no idea where the path is and it's getting dark and I don't want to fall off this cliff so I guess I'll begrudgingly call it a day and maybe try again in a month but probably not') all the more rewarding. It sure has for me!