August 3, 2004

In the mountains near Taga, a small town 15 minutes southeast of Hikone, at the end of a long, steep mountain road, you'll find a cluster of abandoned houses with many of their household goods sitting on the shelves and in cabinets and dressers intact. Clothes, dishes, and even mail, photo albums, school notebooks (and an illustrated Meiji-era porno mag stuffed in the bottom of a chest of drawers) are all to be found in almost pristine condition, and though all of the houses have either been ransacked or have begun to collapse, there are a quite few interesting, and spooky, relics of the original inhabitants.