Gomi-Yama: Climbing a Haikyo of the special kind…

Sometimes you can find a dirty little environmental secret right in public. This is Gomi-Yama (Japanese as in: Gomi=Trash and Yama=Mountain), an abandoned garbage mountain towering over Yokohama.

Idyllic placed right next to a school and a children’s playground, this trash deposit place in Hodogaya near Yokohama accumulated a lot of trash until it reached a peak of about 150 meter.

Unfortunately the owner of this industrial waste mountain went suddenly bankrupt and left the trash and some heavy machinery behind, which I just had to check out. So I started to climb…

…and enjoyed the picturesque vista over Yokohama…

…until I found these.

While these machines still had some shiny parts, they were not moved in years.

View from the machines.

Amazingly, the hydraulics looked just as new.

More of the abandoned machines.

Looking down from the mountain you can see a tennis court, golf and other sports related facilities…

…while on the other side the expressway borders the mountain.

150 meter down there was an inactive water cleaning facility.

Climbing down through walls of trash…

…finding only more trash…

…but also some weird, fascinating shapes.

The last view from Gomi-Yama…

…and a final look back. Its huge!

I’ve made this excursion back in 2005 and for years there was no activity around this mountain. But as I recently passed it at the expressway, I saw that they started again to (hopefully) clean up the mess they left behind.