Sunday 17 January 2010

呪怨の家 Our trip to the Ju-On: The Grudge house!

So today me & Emily took it upon ourselves to go and find the famous house used in the Ju-On films.
The house is in Tokorozawa, Saitama. But we set out knowing only that it was roughly 5 minutes from the station, and with a crappy next-to-zero-use map and a couple of photos for reference.
The best moment on the train was when Emily asked me "is there like, a souvenir shop there?" LMAO.


We arrived at Tokorozawa and some how managed to go in the right direction despite the terrible map.
We eventually found the general area and the 'estate' the house was on.



But finding the house was NOT easy.
The place was a huge maze, with hundreds of little tiny streets and houses upon houses (most of which looked pretty similar.)
Eventually, however, we found the bridge used in Ju-On: The Grudge 2...



(^ 呪怨: The Grudge 2)

We were encouraged by this amazing find!
So we continued the search.
I even asked someone, but that wasn't much use LOL, the conversation:

Me: すみません。あのう、ちょっと変な質問ですが、呪怨の家は...?
Random Unsuspecting Guy on street: えっ?じゅ...おん?
Me: そうです。ホラー映画です。
Random Unsuspecting Guy on street: わかりません...

LOL good to know people in that neighbourhood are aware of whats going on right under their nose!
I bet he's googling it as we speak.

So we carried on our search.
We had been searching for about two hours at this point.
We had this one photo of the house that someone had posted online, and in the background there are two skyscrapers. We were basically going around trying to get these buildings in the right position so we could match them to the photos. We tried so many times. In the end I came up with the world's most rubbish idea: count the number of floors you could see on the building in the photograph (the houses roof was covering the bottom of the building) and then try and match the distance.
The best thing about this rubbish idea, was that it more or less worked.
We had the distance spot on, but we still thought we couldn't find the house.
We were about to give up and said lets just look once more down this road.
So we walked down the street and spotted a very VERY narrow street.
We started walking down the street, and I was saying "This street sort of looks like the street the house is on in the film. There are probably tonnes of streets like this in this area though so we- IT'S THERE!"
Suddenly I spotted the house right infront of us LOL.  Best moment of our actual lives.





(^ 呪怨V1)
The gates of the house were locked and there was a sign saying CCTV IN OPERATION. So we couldn't go in (this time, atleast, since we didn't have disguises, but whats to say we wont go back some time ;))
I think we got some pretty good photos though.
Also stuck our camera over the 6 foot fence to get a nice shot of the back yard!

A seperate little building that was also used in one of the films:



(^ 呪怨V2)

So WE FOUND IT! Its a pretty nice area, and the house itself is nice- a bit run down. BUT ONE DAY I WILL BUY IT AND DO IT UP AND IT WILL BE GRAND.
Yay for Ju-On!
Oh and we heard some pretty strange noises in that backyard too. But, as you can see, nobody was there. CREEPY.

5 comments:

  1. 1) It looks creepy and deserted.
    2) All them houses look the same, how the HELL did you know?
    3) Did you see Kayako?

    LOL xxx

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hope you got some good shots we can use in our never to be edited movie! Lol

    Wish i was there with you!!

    Simon x

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  3. This is so amazing!
    Ahhh! I can't stop looking at these pictures!
    Thank you for putting these up and letting me know about them in YouTube.

    :D

    Wow.
    Looks like you had a ton of fun! I would be tremendously excited! :D
    Hope it's not your last visit there!
    Take care!

    --Axel.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hello,
    My name is Paul (pleger@gmail.com). I am Tokyo for some months, I would to visit the house, if you have any map or any tips how to arrive to the house, and you can share with me I would appreciate a lot.

    Best,
    Paul

    ReplyDelete
  5. I tried to find the location today and failed miserably 🥺 I'm convinced that It has been demolished. There's loads of new builds and tall apartment buildings. I followed your directions and another bloggers.

    ReplyDelete