Hawks Town Mall: Dead and Loving It

Yesterday I got to see the last regular season game at the Fukuoka Dome. This was courtesy of Ena`s employer, who gave her a pair of tickets. Unfortunately they didn`t give her the day off to go with them, so it was a bit of an empty gesture on their part as she had to work that day.

The seats were great, just behind third base. The Hawks lost the game 2-1, but it didn`t matter much as they had clinched the Pacific League about a month ago. After the game the team did a victory lap to celebrate the pennant win, which was cool to see:
After the game I made my way through the Hawks Town Mall,which is where I parked my bike. The Hawks Town Mall is something of an albatross in the Fukuoka landscape and I`ve been meaning to write something about it for the longest time, so I thought I`d use this post to do just that.
This is the story of what is slowly turning into a `dead mall`. Dead malls - that is to say malls that are either completely or partially empty and abandoned - are a relativly common part of the landscape in North America but they are relatively rare in Japan. Japan of course has tons of abandoned buildings, especially in the countryside, but malls are a relatively new phenomenah here so most haven`t been around long enough to have completely failed yet.
The Hawks Town Mall is pretty new, having opened in 2000. It was part of a larger development of the area on reclaimed land which included the SeaHawk Hotel and the Fukuoka Dome itself. The original plans date back to the late 80s during the height of the bubble when the Hawks first moved to Fukuoka from their old home in Osaka. The overly ambitious early plans envisioned two domes being built, though the second dome was later dropped from the plans.

The whole place was bought by a Singaporean fund, GIC, in 2007 and by the looks of it they have had some trouble trying to keep the Mall running.

I say this because when we arrived in 2008 it was very obvious that they were having trouble finding tenants to fill the place. Back then most of the shops were at least open, but there was an abundance of empty space. It seemed like they were giving massive stores to businesses that only had enough merchandise to fill about half the space they were given. This Hawks souvenir shop I visited yesterday would be one example:
Huge aisles and racks about half full. You almost never see this type of inefficient use of space in Japan, where shops are normally packed to the rafters with almost no elbow room.

Over the years though even this strategy proved incapable of keeping all the shops occupied and boarded up storefronts began to appear.
By the time I visited yesterday, it was apparent that the problem was spiralling out of control. Empty shops were everywhere.
Wandering around I discovered that a couple of entire wings of the mall had been closed off:
Behind the temporary screens, dozens of store sit empty and silent:The Hawks Town Mall has two floors and before these wings were closed off it had a rather sprawling layout. Just about everywhere you go you see bits where they have closed hallways off: I`m not sure why the mall has done so poorly. It is one of three major mall projects in Fukuoka. The first one, Canal City, is doing quite well and in fact just expanded. The second one, Marinoa, is having problems. It used to have the largest ferris wheel in Japan, but a few months ago the thing collapsed while workers were disassembling it, crushing a few cars and damaging a hotel attached to the mall.

Canal City, it should be noted, is in a very busy part of town right next to the Nakasu entertainment district, so it has no problem getting people in the doors. Hawks Town Mall and Marinoa, on the other hand, are in much less convenient locations on the periphery of town and neither has a direct subway or train link, which probably explains part of their problems. If you visit the Hawks Town Mall on a day when the Hawks aren`t playing a home game it is likely to be almost completely deserted. It also doesn`t help much that Hawks Town, despite what the tourist information says, is not a particularly interesting piece of architecture. While a lot of people don`t like it, Canal City at least has the benefit of looking interesting and having a lot of flair in its design. Hawks Town Mall is, in contrast, your typical cheaply made piece of functional dreck that most malls are built like. And the shopping isn`t particularly good either, other than a Toys R Us its largest shops seem to mostly be ones selling Hawks souvenirs, which do all their business on days when the Hawks have home games (less than 80 days a year) and are of limited interest to anyone the rest of the time.

Anyway, if you enjoy that sense of schadenfreude at seeing big, ill-conceived mega projects that have failed completely - a trip to the Hawks Town Mall is for you!

Resurrecting the Blog

Its been about 3 months since I updated this blog, which is skirting the edge of `dead blog` territory.

Part of the lack of posting has been time related - I`ve been quite busy lately. Another part has been dog related - since we got the dog we haven`t taken as many day trips as we used to and those were the type of thing I used to blog about here the most so without them, my blog material sort of dried up.

Anyway, I really like this blog so I thought I should post something - anything - to keep it afloat for at least a little while longer!

On the weekend Ena and I had a good day off together, which provided me with a little something to write about. October is a really great month in Fukuoka, the weather is perfect. We had lunch at this restaurant in Tenjin Central Park that is located in a historical building, pictured at the top of this post.
We had been meaning to eat there ever since we moved here 3 years ago but never seemed to find the best opportunity so we just said `screw it, we`re trying this place`. It was quite nice, they have a good lunch set which is reasonably priced. The interior is pretty cool too, very Meiji retro.

After that we cycled over to Ohori Koen where we rented a rowboat and did a half hour spin around the lake.
Ena let me take over the oars after a bit:
Hard to imagine a better place to be than in a rowboat on a pleasant lake in the park on a nice sunny day. All in all a very nice day!

Putting Stickers on Bikes and the Chiba Lotte Marine's Bus

The rainy season has finally finished and we had our first weekend with some sunny weather so the two of us headed downtown yesterday sans dog.
Ena suggested inaugurating my new bike with some stickers. So we went to the loft and I chose a sheet of 1970s style Marvel Super Hero faces:
And Ena got some penguins for hers:
I put Iron Man on mine:
and Ena put the penguins on hers:
I got a whole bunch of points on my card at Bic Camera when I bought my new bike, so we stopped there so I could splurge on some more bike swag:
My bike now has its own computer with speedometer, odometer, clock, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

We went for a pretty nice, though hot, bike ride out to Marinoa and back. On the return trip we rode past the Fukuoka Dome, where a game had just ended. The visiting team (Chiba Lotte Marines) were just leaving the stadium via their team bus as we rode by.
We noticed the crowd of fans swarming around and joined them for a few minutes:
Watching people slowly get on a bus one by one isn't a particularly entertaining activity so we only hung around for a couple of minutes.

We stopped for dinner on the way back at an outdoor patio along the river in Nakasu.
Its the perfect place to rest after a long hot summer's day:

Got M'self a New Bicycle Today.

If seven time Tour de France champion and suspected dope fiend Lance Armstrong were to come up to me one day and ask:

"Sean, tell me about your new bike. Describe it for me in three words or less."

I would say to him:

"Well, Lance, thanks for asking. The three words that would best describe it are: very, very yellow.''

And that would probably be the end of the conversation.
I didn't intend to buy a new bicycle when I woke this morning. I was supposed to spend this sunny day entirely in my study room looking at a computer screen.

Thankfully on my way in my old bicycle suddenly broke down. A spoke on the back wheel snapped, making a huge bang. The wheel started to wobble after that and the thing became un-rideable. This is the third time that bike has suffered a broken spoke for no apparent reason.

I took it to the nearest repair shop and they said it'll take them 2-3 weeks to fix it, which is what it usually takes them.

After leaving it there and pondering 2-3 weeks without wheels for a second, I decided it was time to get a new bike.

I've noticed that in Higashi Ku everyone rides really boring bikes. Functional and colorless. We are not a stylish people, us Higashi Ku-ians.

Go downtown though and it is wall to wall hep cats riding much cooler looking bikes. Sleek, colorful and smoove. I've always wanted one of them stylish bikes the city folk downtown ride. So I decided to get on the train and go around to some of the hep cat bike shops in Tenjin to see what they had.

I went to a few. I eventually decided on this one. Its just so...very very yellow. The grips on the handlebars are very very yellow:
The seat is very very yellow:
Even the chain is very very yellow:
It provides a refreshing contrast with my shoes, which are very very blue:
And if you ride it on those yellow bits of the sidewalk for blind people, it becomes completely camouflaged when viewed from above. Very useful if you are being chased by a helicopter:
This thing is the complete opposite of my old bike, which is all black and gray. On the down side my new very very yellow bike doesn't have a basket or fenders, so it can't completely replace the old one, which will still be doing shopping duties. This one weighs about half as much and I can go much much faster on it than can possibly be safe for me, so I'll just use it for high speed chases and that sort of thing.

my frst wok by doogle

my name iz doogle and i went fo a wok today and it wuz my frst wok and it wuz fun and i wiked it.
at frst it wuz not fun and i didn wike it and i did not wont to go fo a wok.
my atitude wemained the same for some time. i wuz vewy stubbon.
den I sat between enas feet becuz i am vewy manipulatib. Emoshunally speaking.
Yes, mor of de same.
den i stawted to wok and de humanz wer vewy happy.
i wuz vewy good at woking but i don no how to cop with dis weash thing so i got vewy angwy, tho you cant tell dat from dis foto.
i wuz getting tird of all de attenshun so i woked rite off camewa.
and demanded dat dey take me home dat instant.
so ena pikked me up.
and we went home togever.

de end. by doogle.

This Toy Poodle is no Toy. He is Doogle.

I thought I'd put up some more pictures of Doogle here. Our computer suffered a catastrophic hard drive failure that wiped out most of my photos, but fortunately these ones were in the memory card to my camera still.

Anyway, that isn't important. What is important is Doogle, a fact that he never tires of driving home to us by biting our ankles and ripping the socks off our feet. He is a little frustrated at the moment because he has to wait a few more weeks (ugh) until we can take him out. One more vaccination we keep telling ourselves...one more.

Well, we can sort of take him out now, we just can't put him on the ground. Ena bought a little dog carrier for him and we sometimes just carry him around in that. It fits into my bicycle basket perfectly:
Sometimes he looks cozy:
But in general he is not a fan of bicycle trips:
Another feature of dog ownership we are discovering is that it turns the floor of your home into a massive accumulation of dog-related stuff. We've got pee sheets, dog toys, toilet paper rolls (he likes those), torn up bits of tissue (we hate the fact that he likes those), more dog toys, socks that he has torn of four feet and a ton of other crap. EVERYWHERE.

One of his favorite toys is Suzanne here:
Doogle and Suzanne are a bit of an item. By which I mean they....um...(ahem)....have relations (cough cough). This is another thing the vet tells us we will have to wait a while to have dealt with.

Anyway, it is impossible to stay mad at this monster. Look at that face up above. Too damned cute.