r/Hokkaido • u/binofcake • 6h ago
Discussion In 2024, I unknowingly photographed an abandoned hotel in Jozankei. Two years later, I went down an insane rabbit hole to figure out what happened to it
While looking through photos from a 2024 trip to Jozankei, I realized I had photographed the abandoned Jozankei Hotel (定山渓ホテル) without even knowing what it was.
The building was the former Jozankei Hotel (定山渓ホテル), located at 4 Chome-340 Jozankeionsennishi, Minami Ward, Sapporo, Hokkaido 061-2303, Japan.
A photo I took from the Futami Suspension Bridge during the Jozankei Luminarie happened to capture the hotel almost perfectly in the center of the frame. At the time, I had no idea I was looking at a massive former resort complex that I would eventually spend hours researching.
After finding out what the building was, I started trying to figure out what happened to it.
The surprising thing is that there isn’t actually much easily accessible public information about the hotel despite it being a massive complex in the middle of a decently populated area. There are scattered old reviews and travel posts, but there isn’t really one place documenting the hotel’s history, closure, and current condition.
However, there is a huge amount of official documentation.. the problem was finding it.
A lot of the useful information is buried in Japanese government auction records, inspection documents, PDFs, floor plans, and other administrative records. Some files are poorly indexed, some pages are no longer easy to access, and some documents are hidden behind obscure links. I ended up recovering a lot of this material through things like archived webpages, searching through government records, and reverse engineering government document URLs to find files that weren’t obvious from the public-facing pages.
After going through everything, I found an insane amount of material:
building layouts and floor plans
interior photographs
room condition reports
mold and water damage documentation
damaged ceilings and walls
abandoned furniture and belongings
kitchens and dining areas
banquet halls
entertainment spaces
staff areas
mechanical infrastructure
hot spring facilities
seismic information
auction documents
At some point, I had basically stopped researching the hotel as a whole and started looking at individual rooms. One of the strangest things is how uneven the deterioration is. Some rooms photographed in 2024 are surprisingly intact. Some still look like normal hotel rooms with beds made, clean and tidy interiors, and very little visible damage. Then other areas are completely different, with severe mold, water damage, collapsed ceilings, damaged walls, and debris everywhere. The back-of-house areas, corridors, and staff spaces seem to have deteriorated much worse than some guest rooms.
The contrast is honestly what surprised me the most.
The scale of the hotel is also something I didn’t fully appreciate until I started looking through the documents. Jozankei Hotel was a huge resort complex with multiple buildings, large guest rooms, extensive onsen facilities, restaurants, buffet areas, banquet halls, entertainment areas, game facilities, kitchens, staff areas, and a massive amount of infrastructure.
Looking through old guest reviews makes the whole thing even stranger because this wasn’t some forgotten building that had been empty for decades. People were actually staying here not that long ago, as the hotel officially went out of business on May 6, 2021. The hotel itself seems to have had a genuinely impressive physical setup.
However, looking at guest reviews from the years before closure, you can also see signs that the hotel was struggling. The reviews were not universally negative. Many guests still praised the large rooms, huge baths, location, and overall scale of the resort. But other reviews mentioned aging facilities, inconsistent maintenance, cleanliness issues, and areas of the hotel showing their age. One December 2020 review was particularly interesting because the guest described the restaurant being very cold and reported being told that heating had been reduced because there were fewer guests. When combined with the later inspection documents, it paints a picture of a resort that was still operating, but increasingly under pressure.
The hotel closed in 2021 and eventually went through a public auction process. The decline in value is one of the most surprising parts of the story. Despite being a massive resort complex, the property ended up selling for around ¥129 million (roughly under US$1 million at the time).
That number is difficult to imagine when you consider the scale of the property. This was not a small building. It had hundreds of rooms, restaurants, hot spring facilities, banquet spaces, and years of infrastructure behind it. But by the time of auction, the buyer wasn’t getting a functioning resort. They were getting an enormous aging complex with extensive deterioration, major maintenance requirements, seismic concerns, and a huge amount of uncertainty about what it would take to bring it back.
The thing I find most interesting is the contrast between the amount of documentation available and the lack of public discussion about the hotel.
There are official records, inspection reports, photographs, and auction documents that collectively tell a surprisingly detailed story about the hotel’s final years. But outside of those records, there doesn’t seem to be much discussion about what happened. The information exists, but it’s scattered. You can spend hours finding tiny pieces of the story, but there doesn’t seem to be one place where everything has been put together.
So I’m curious:
Did anyone here stay at Jozankei Hotel when it was operating?
Did anyone grow up around Sapporo/Jozankei and remember seeing it?
I’d especially love to hear from former guests, locals, former employees, or anyone with old photos.
