Greetings fellow explorers! It’s been quite a while since my last haikyo post – over half a year in fact. Although this one does not ring in as an account of exploration in itself, it’s nevertheless teeming with urbex stuff.

Although my urbex updates have been infrequent as of late, my explorations certainly have not atrophied. Since May last year I’ve been to numerous locations both in Japan and abroad, coordinated and produced for television crews shooting on Hashima Island and had both my most physically and mentally changing urban explorations to date. Vivid memories of avoiding security dogs and hiding in a lonely attic for hours live on as powerful snapshots in my mind.

My day job keeps me busier than ever, meaning little time to write up adventures and organise pictures. My hard drive is a clutter of random files, to-do lists and bulging folders full of dark, creepy ruins photos that would make any professional photographer scream in frustration. My mind scrapes and tears in desperation at the archives of memories slowly rotting away inside my head.

Enough.

It would be a terrible thing to have all the juicy details of my explorations slowly fade away from me. There’s only so much I can retain in scribbled notes and the recollections my pictures evoke whilst browsing them. So for my own benefit more than anything, I’m going to make a concentrated effort to start writing and documenting again. I fear I may not be able to keep up the strict levels of high quality I’ve come to demand of myself in doing so (my urbex posts seem to get longer and more detailed each time), but far better to get things out there and iterate than for the stories I have to tell never to be heard. If you’re willing to come along on the journey with me, welcome aboard!

Already a chunk of January has disappeared without notice, so to kick-start things off with this journal entry, there’s also a minor urbex update from when I re-visited the famous ghost island of Gunkanjima in October 2013. I was there coordinating, interpreting and filming with a television crew for several days, during which I managed to drop a little geocache onto the island.

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Here’s to a great year then!