The infamous Hotel Lumiere..

The Hotel Lumiere, located in the middle of a Maruyamacho street full of love hotels was the unfortunate location of a woman's death at the beginning of last month. She had checked in with a man in the early morning hours of Jan 8, and her body was found in the bath at around 4 pm. I was walking through the area when her body was found, and while I didn't know what was going down, the amount of police, detectives, and emergency vehicles that filled the surrounding streets made it obvious that it was something pretty horrific. As a completely unrelated piece of useless information, the hotel is situated around 100 metres from where the Shiespa pump room exploded in the summer of 2007..

Shiespa: One year on..

Went by the Shiespa building this morning to see what it looked like one year on, what I found was pretty much to be expected: the building is still boarded up and guarded 24 hours a day, a flower adorned table sits in front of the fenced off building, and media were beginning to arrive and assemble their gear. The house that once stood beside the destroyed pump room has now been turned into a car park, and the rest of the houses that were so viscously shaken have been restored to a somewhat untouched condition. Interestingly, the flower pots at the end of the street that had been ripped apart and upturned by the blast remain on the road, somewhat destroyed.

Another interesting thing came to me today in the form of a comment made on a Youtube video I posted about the explosion shortly after it happened, the poster clarifying that I had made a mistake with the date I put in the video, but also adding this:

"The owner of this chain..they have one in Roppongi which also had some trouble a while back) lives in the neighborhood in a huge house, probably worth 8, 9 million dollars. His name hasn't come up in the press. Wonder how he managed to do that."

The Shiespa Gas Explosion: revisited

Today marks one year since the Shiespa gas explosion that killed three people. It was a quiet sunny Monday last year when we heard an almighty explosion that shook our apartment building more than any quake had ever done, my Mum was visiting and she remarked that it sounded like a bomb had gone off. A quick investigative trip to the balcony revealed a huge plume of smoke rising into the air, just a couple of blocks down the hill. I grabbed my camera and jumped on my bike and was there within a couple of minutes of the explosion. I arrived to a scene of chaos, dust and concrete filling the air, and a small group of people slowly converging on the scene. A couple of police sprinted past me communicating through their shoulder radio piece what they could work out had happened, and for a few minutes the handful of people stood, stared, and tried to work it out themselves. It was a good 10 minutes before the police cordoned off the area and the real media began to arrive, and for the next few days it became the centre of one of the nations major news stories. At that time we didn't know if it was a bomb or what, we didn't even know if anyone was inside the building when it had exploded, but as the chaos ensued it became pretty obvious that there were people both inside, and walking past that had been majorly injured.

Gas leak in Maruyamacho

This morning a Tokyo Gas Emergency crew and a handful of police showed up downstairs, cordoned off our section of the street and investigated a gas leak in the building next door. No-one was evacuated and it was over relatively quickly but it did bring back scary memories of the Shiespa gas explosion that killed three people just down the road at pretty much this time last year.

When the yellow police tape comes out and your apartment is sectioned off, you know it's not gonna be good..

Shiespa revisited