Kappa Onsen and Kinugawa Kan

The image takes in both buildings of the Kinugawa Kan complex from across the river gorge. Kinugawa Kan itself rises in concrete tiers up the side of the cliff. The building is large. Guest rooms and corridors stack up its face, windows now opaque or broken. Below it, hugging the riverbank, sits the Kappa Onsen, a single-storey traditional structure with a tiled roof that contrasts with the modernist hotel above. The river runs below them, narrow and fast. Trees have started to grow up between the two buildings, in cracks where there used to be paths.

Kinugawa was a hot spring town built on weekend tourism from Tokyo. At its peak in the 1980s, the gorge held dozens of large hotels stacked along the cliffs, each one offering rooms with onsen views and traditional baths fed by the local thermal waters. When the bubble economy collapsed and corporate trips fell out of favour, the gorge emptied out. Kinugawa Kan declared bankruptcy in June 1999. The hotel was never demolished. The Kappa Onsen below it, named for the river spirit of Japanese folklore, closed at the same time. Both buildings still stand, slowly losing the fight to the gorge they were built into.