The ″fruition of huge facilities″ Abandoned hotels

The local government could not handle it…

The walls are peeling, glass is broken, and weeds are growing inside the building. These are photos of abandoned hotels in various parts of Japan. They are the “ruins” of huge facilities that have been abandoned for decades and left to fall into disrepair.

The number of group tours that flourished until the bubble period has decreased, and many hotel buildings that went out of business due to poor management remain in an unattended state. It is said that there are more than 300 such abandoned hotels throughout Japan, and they are causing trouble for local governments.

Shimoda City in Shizuoka Prefecture is one municipality plagued by a number of abandoned hotels. A fire broke out about three years ago at an inn that had become unoccupied and was known as a haunted spot. The city decided to dismantle the inn in August of this year through administrative execution. In addition, there is an abandoned hotel that the city bought up.’ It is a large facility (see photo above) that closed around 2000.

The city purchased the land and building approximately four years ago, considering the negative impact on the landscape and the risk of the building collapsing in the event of a major earthquake. We plan to clear the land and develop the park in the future. The total project cost, including demolition costs, is 1.3 to 2.3 billion yen. Since it will be difficult to cover the cost with city funds alone, we are considering the use of national and prefectural subsidies as well as private funds,” said Shimoda City Construction Division.

Nikko City in Tochigi Prefecture, home to the famous Kinugawa Onsen hot springs and known as “Tokyo’s back yard,” is another municipality that is having trouble dealing with abandoned hotels. In the city’s hot spring resort area, which bustles with one million guests a year, there is a corner where abandoned hotels suddenly stand in a row. All of these hotels went out of business between the 1990s and 2000s. The city has sealed off the buildings to prevent trespassing and other problems.

There are about 15 hotels in the city that are no longer in operation. We have asked the owners we have been able to contact to properly manage the hotels, but they have not responded. While citizens have expressed their desire to see the abandoned lodging facilities demolished to avoid a negative image of the hot spring resort area, the cost is estimated to be about 1 billion yen per building, which is not within the city’s capacity to handle. Unless the government takes action, there is nothing that can be done,” said a member of the Nikko City Planning and General Affairs Department.

The Japan Tourism Agency has been subsidizing the removal of abandoned buildings up to 100 million yen (up to half of the demolition cost) since FY2009. However, the Tourism Agency’s Tourism Industry Division has finally begun to consider a new system to raise the subsidy amount, as “some people say that the high cost of demolition has made it impossible to remove the abandoned buildings. Ken Tomita, a real estate appraiser and expert on the abandoned hotel issue, points out, “In places where land prices are low, there are hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies.

In places where land prices are low, even if you spend several hundred million yen to demolish and clear the land, you will not be able to get a value that is commensurate with the cost of demolition. This is one reason why owners in financial difficulty do not dismantle their buildings and leave them as abandoned hotels. In order to prevent further increase in the number of abandoned hotels, it may be necessary to revise the system to collect and accumulate future demolition costs compulsorily little by little from the operators at the stage of building accommodation facilities.”

Ruined hotels can make a tourist destination look abandoned. In Japan, where annual inbound tourism income is approximately 10 trillion yen, it is an urgent issue to take countermeasures.

From the December 12, 2025 issue of FRIDAY