Cages, more cages. Lined up, stacked, sometimes open. The rusted metal catches the light as if it refused to disappear. The air is heavy, charged with a past that never really left. Welcome to an institute whose name doesn’t matter: here, it’s the traces that speak.
An address that won’t give itself away
There are places you find on a map, and others you have to earn. This one clearly belongs to the second category. For months, I’d seen a few images go by on social media, slipped between two scrolls, videos carefully cut before the essential. Nothing concrete, but enough to plant an obsession.
Then a detail. An almost ridiculous clue, but one that cracks the scenery open. Fragments, correspondences, certainties that weren’t certain yet. Until the moment I understand that the place really exists — and that it isn’t waiting to be found, but to be understood.
The theatre of absent bodies
Inside, everything is still there. Whole rooms of metal cages, as if the space had been designed to contain, store, classify the living. Further on, operating tables, cold surfaces, analysis installations whose function you guess without wanting to name it.
Nothing has been staged, and that’s precisely what’s disturbing. The place is raw, functional, on pause. You move slowly, as if the noise could wake something. The damp seeps in everywhere, and each room seems to have kept a physical memory.
What was tested here
Japan, like many countries, long used animal experimentation in very varied contexts: pharmaceutical research, toxicology studies, the development of veterinary products. Mice, rats, but also dogs or primates depending on the protocols.
What sets the Japanese framework apart is less the existence of these practices than how they’re regulated. Where Europe or the United States impose licences, controls and inspections, Japan relies largely on the self-regulation of institutions. Each establishment defines its own rules, its own limits. A freedom that also leaves blind spots.
The stories you’d rather not read
Some places, abandoned today, left behind more than empty walls. In the 2000s, a pharmaceutical laboratory was found with its installations still in place, chemicals included, and animals left on site. The case left a mark, as much for the conditions as for the disorganisation of the abandonment.
More recently, several major Japanese companies have been called out for unnecessary experiments, sometimes tied to food or cosmetic products. Under pressure, some eventually changed course.
A presence that won’t say its name
What strikes me isn’t the violence. What’s disturbing is the absence: the absence of movement in places designed to contain it, the absence of noise in spaces that weren’t made for silence. And above all, that persistent sense of being one too many.
My eye then lingers on almost insignificant details: a slightly open cage, a faded label, a mark on the floor. Nothing spectacular, and yet everything becomes suspect. Here, even the emptiness seems occupied.
To explore, or to look differently
This kind of place isn’t visited, it’s passed through — with that strange distance between curiosity and unease that won’t let go of you. I wasn’t there for images, nor to tick off one more spot. Something else is at play here, a gentle confrontation with what we usually prefer to leave out of frame.
You come out without certainty, without a really clear story to tell. Just fragments, and a feeling that sticks a little too long. The cages are empty, obviously. But looking at them one last time, it’s hard not to feel the opposite.
Here, the emptiness erases nothing. It keeps everything.
