The Underground Temple

Three trains and a taxi ride north of Tokyo there’s a football pitch on the banks of the Edo River. There you’ll find the portal to the “Underground Temple.”

The Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel is a multibillion-dollar underground stormwater megaproject that protects the greater Tokyo area from floods. For years I’ve wanted to experience its disorienting scale that feels straight out of an early 2000s video game.

With the help of Google Translate we followed our guide from the Edogawa River Office down a couple hundred stairs into the humid abyss. We visited in early October and the channel was still wet from the recent typhoons that had deposited a thick layer of sediment along the smooth concrete floor.

The signs around the facility call it the “Underground Temple” and the “Disaster Prevention Shrine.” While it’s not a temple in the traditional sense, if you’re deep into infrastructure it can definitely be a spiritual experience. There was something oddly meditative about wandering the endless concrete cavern. Then it was the same taxi and three trains back to central Tokyo, far from the echoing silence of the Underground Temple.

📍Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel
Kasukabe, Japan

All images shot on Kodak 500T 35mm film.