Located in Kyoto, Japan, the Ukiyoe Small Museum has extremely flexible hours, at least for its owner/operator, artist Ichimura Mamoru, whose sign explains: “When I’ve had enough the store is closed.”

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In big black block letters on a white placard, the message contrasts with the historic facade and is hard to mess. For years, the signage was only in Japanese, but a kind tourist translated it for him into English, at least roughly, so foreign visitors could also get with his unusual program.

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Inside one will find woodblock prints in the traditional ukiyo-e style, which dates back to the 17th Century. These “pictures of the floating world” capture everyday scenes with recognizable perspectives.

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Though less popular now, Mamoru and others like him still make work along the same lines — he learned from his grandfather, and is one of the last few dozen artists of his kind in Japan.

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Those who manage to catch him during his hours of operation can tour the museum, shop and his workshop as well to see how the artwork gets made.

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No matter how familiar you may be with Japan, you’ve never seen it like this before. Video production company Armadas has produced an incredible 5.5-minute film that swoops over major cities, giving us a bird’s eye view.

Shot between 2017 and 2019 in places like Tokyo, Kyoto, Nagoya, Yokohama and Hakodate, the film was released on YouTube on September 1. It’s really cool to see the country from these angles, but there’s one caveat: unless you have a screen with 8K capabilities, you aren’t going to be able to enjoy it at its fullest, taking in the 60 frames per second to catch every sharp detail.

In that way, it’s sort of like opening a gift you won’t be able to fully enjoy for a couple more years – but it’s still worth watching at the best possible quality your devices can handle.

You can find more of Armadas’ work on Vimeo.

In Japan, digital megaliths emerge from the floor of an abandoned bath house, coming alive with animated flowers and water in a beautiful mash-up of light art, projections and abandoned places. Multidisciplinary collective TeamLab designed the work to continuously render in real time, so it’s neither pre-recorded nor on a loop.

The concept of the project is that non-material digital technology, i.e. TeamLab’s illusory projections, can transform nature into art without harming it. While “Megaliths in the Bath House Ruins” inserts strange illusory structures into an abandoned space, “Graffiti Nature,” another exhibit in the show, imagines local endangered wildlife as living graffiti. As seen in the rest of TeamLab’s work, the projections are interactive, moving and changing according to the way visitors move, so the show is never exactly the same twice.

TeamLab speaks of the bath house and its forested surroundings in terms of “space-times,” exploring the relationship of this particular exhibit to its larger “A Forest Where Gods Live, Ruins and Heritage, The Nature of Time” show.

“The forest surrounding the bath house ruins is home to 3,000-year-old trees, and it changes daily with the imperceptible, slow flow of time, repeating every year, as a space where the endlessly long time accumulates. The ruins from ages past scattered in the forest and the Edo-period garden which remains today each have their own respective space-times. The bath house was made in modern times, but after just a short period, it was abandoned, becoming a space-time where time had stopped completely. And this group of megaliths is also a mass made up of compressed space-times where the flow of time varies. Here, various space-times intersect and overlap.”

“Each megalith is surrounded by similarly standing megaliths, the space-times of which are all connected. Furthermore, these space-times are connected to those of other megaliths distributed around the world. Artworks move between the megaliths, traveling between the nearby megaliths in the same space, as well as through the megaliths around the world. The works within the space-time influence each other.”

The show takes place at the 500,000-square-meter Mifuneyama Rakuen Park, which includes the famous 3,000-year-old sacred Okuso tree of the Takeo Shrine and another 300-year-old sacred tree located at the center of the garden. TeamLab is particularly interested in the vague boundaries between the manicured garden and the wild forest, and between our current time and the experiences of the people who have interacted with the space over millennia.

As with any TeamLab exhibit, there’s a lot to see here. Check out the video of “A Forest Where Gods Live” for digital projections onto natural spaces within the park, and head to the group’s website for lots more photos, videos and info.

Somewhere over the sea lies the abandoned Hotel La Rainbow, a cracked jewel of Japan’s Bubble Era that failed to attract its target market of bridge geeks.

A Bridge, Too Far

The “Hotel La Rainbow & Tower” (to use its official name) seemed like a great idea at the time. Then again, Japan’s lost and lamented “Bubble Era” saw countless such brainstorms bloom into “what was I thinking – or drinking” white elephants before the Asset Price Bubble economy finally burst in early 1992.

Suspended Belief

Not all of these extravagant mega-projects were busts, mind you. Take the Great Seto Bridge, a four-lane, double-deck, 8-mile-long series of 11 constituent bridges built – at a cost of US$ 7 billion – to connect the islands of Honshu and Shikoku. The Great Seto Bridge took 10 years to construct, saw the loss of 13 workers’ lives in the process, and was considered a true wonder of the world when it opened in 1988.

Ready, Seto, Go!

Surely tourists from across the nation and the world at large would be flocking to Okayama prefecture to take in the jaw-dropping view of the Great Seto Bridge stretching out over the Inland Sea! If only there was a hotel, complete with observation tower, available for these deep-pocketed travelers to rest their bones and spend their yen… and in late-1980s Japan, investors’ dreams all-too-often came true.

Rooms With a View

So it was that in late 1988, a private investment group opened the La Rainbow Hotel & Tower, situated on a prime piece of Okayama real estate overlooking the Inland Sea. The view encompassed the 4,600 ft long Shimotsui-Seto Bridge (the northernmost stage of the Great Seto Bridge) and a number of small islands projected to become a sort of “Japanese Venice” as regional development progressed. Unfortunately, reality set in when the bubble burst and the associated Seto Sea Boom ended with a bang – and more than a few whimpers.

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So Over It Japans Abandoned Hotel La Rainbow

The reputedly haunted Nakagusuku Hotel in Okinawa, Japan freaked-out construction workers so much, they walked off the job before the hotel was even finished.

Guest Lost

The ruins of the Nakagusuku Hotel in Kitanakagusuku, Okinawa are a rare example of a structure seemingly cursed by fate and doomed to failure BEFORE it could even open for business. Remember the creepy “sacrilegious” housing development in the movie Poltergeist? It’s sorta like that, but in real life.

Naming Names

There are many mysteries swirling around the Nakagusuku Hotel – even its name is open to question. Depending on who you ask, it’s been referred to variously as the Royal Hotel, the Takahara Hotel, and the Kogen Hotel. The “Royal Hotel” probably was the intended commercial name: the word “ROYAL” was painted above the entrance and although now quite faded, it can still be discerned in good lighting. The evocative photos accompanying this article, by the way, were posted to Flickr by member keiyac in March of 2019.

Forlorn Fortress

The aborted hotel’s location invites speculation as well, being situated a mere 50 meters (roughly 165 feet) from the ruins of Nakagusuku Castle. The latter is a 15th-century stone fortress that was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the year 2000… almost a quarter-century after construction started (and stopped) at the hotel site.

All’s Fair

But we digress… back to the oranges, er, origins of the story. In 1975 the island hosted the Okinawa Ocean Exposition, aka “Expo ’75”. This little-known event was a World’s Fair conceived as a way to celebrate the return of the Ryukyu Island chain to Japan from the United States a mere THREE YEARS earlier. Kinda quick as anniversaries go but hey, World’s Fair folks!

Aha, Naha

A wealthy businessman from Naha (the capitol city of Okinawa) saw Expo ’75 as a unique business opportunity, and quickly secured a prime stretch of property on a hilltop just south of the castle ruins. The location was perfect, offering breathtaking views of the East China Sea on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other. The complex was to include a hotel, a vacation resort and a water park. What could possibly go wrong?

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Haunted Hotel Unfinished Abandoned Okinawa Resort Inn