Yes, no joke – one of the most (in)famous buildings in Amagasaki, Hyogo, is called the ‘Hitler’ Surgical Hospital! Well, I guess “was” is the more correct term as they started demolishing the thing in late May of 2010.
I passed by the ‘Hitler’ hospital several times on my way to the only Costco in Kansai, but I never paid much attention to it other than taking a few quick pictures to have proof of this extreme form of ignorance and insensibility – why in the world would anybody name a hospital after the maybe most hated person in human history? (Well, it was the ヒトラ外科病院, not the ヒトラー外科病院 – but although the character indicating a long vowel was missing it is highly unlikely that the naming was a coincidence, especially since you only find the dictator and the hospital when you look for ヒトラ on the internet…)
I actually don’t even know how long the place was really abandoned. In March they still had a (quite run-down looking) sign outside on the main street – and that was gone in April. It was in April, too, that I passed the clinic after shooting a haikyo when it was almost dark outside and there were no lights in the building – but since I carried a lot of groceries and it was on a weekend day anyways I didn’t pay a lot of attention to that fact. Now the hospital with its departments for stomach and intestines, circulatory, surgery, orthopedics, neurosurgery, radiology, and rehabilitation is gone. And I wonder if anybody is really sad about it. (Except for me for the fact that I never made it inside, leaving this one of those unfulfilling “outside haikyo” – I really wish I’d taken more pictures when I had the chance, but I never took my camera when I went grocery shopping at a place where the smallest bag of potato chips weighs 1kg…)
2010-06-04 addendum: Due to the explanation given by Thomas I slightly changed a sentence and put the “Hitler” in apostrophies as I guess we will never find out what the people deciding the name thought when they put up the signs onto the top of the building.
(You can find out where the ‘Hitler’ Surgical Hospital was by clicking here.)
Sadly I share a birthday with Hitler, no joke.
I wonder if this hospital was built at a time when Hitler and Japan were on good terms? Might explain the name, sort of a suck-up.
History aside, I enjoyed the contrast of the picture of the bright operational Seven Eleven with the rusting abandoned hospital behind it. It’s a pity you couldn’t get inside because there probably would have been some great creepy photos opportunities for sure.
Btw, congrats on your article with Tokyo Weekender. I’m a bit late sorry.
Hi Leni,
the hospital didn’t look that old to be honest, maybe 30 or 40 years old – there aren’t really a lot of buildings left in Japan from the 1930s and 1940s, especially in Kansai. I guess the explanation Thomas gave is a good one and the people who decided on the name and writing it in katakana were either not thinking or chose the ambiguous name on purpose.
I guess I have to be quicker next time. There is still a list of places I can go to and there is always the concern that I might get to one of them too late (it happened before…) – on the other hand I have only so much spare time and I don’t want to run out of places to go to by the end of the month either.
Thanks a lot, supporting Tokyo Weekender was a very pleasant experience – Elisabeth did a great job writing the article! I got a copy of the printed issue yesterday (since I live in Kansai I can’t just grab one) and was very happy to see that they used even more pictures there than in the online version. While Mike got the cover (congratulations, that’s huge!) and three pictures on the third page of the article they used one of mine for the table of content and five more on the first two pages of the article – and they put a nice spin on the layout, making it look kind of “broken”.
I wonder if they were just trying to make 人等 (hi-to-ra) look more “cool” and easy to read by using katakana. That’s done quite often here. 人等 would be “the people”, which sounds way less terrible than Hitler!
Hi Thomas,
thanks a lot for the explanation – interesting, I had no clue about that way of interpreting the characters…
And since “Bystander” wrote a similar explanation with 3 insults in 4 sentences: While I appreciate your remarks maybe you should think about your wording. I won’t censor criticism, but I won’t publish insults here either.
I never hid the fact that my Japanese is rather basic, so I did indeed quite a lot of research before posting this blog entry. Three friends who work as Japanese translators, one of them half Japanese, used the Hitler reading – they actually told me about the place. 2 online dictionaries gave me the Hitler explanation (adding the onbiki) and search engines pointed me to the dictator and the hospital, nowhere else. When I passed by the hospital on the day I took the last couple of photos with 4 Japanese natives not one of them objected to my “I have to take some pictures of the Hitler Hospital”. The “people” explanation sounds like a good one – but maybe the owners of the hospital should have used kanji or hiragana, not katakana as they usually imply the use of a foreign word. In fact when I asked another Japanese native about the “people” explanation I was told that (and I quote) “normal Japanese people” wouldn’t think of ‘people’ when the term ‘ヒトラ’ (hitora = people) is combined with the word ‘病院’ (byouin = hospital).
So I guess whoever made that decision must have at least known about the possible misunderstanding – and if somebody raises his arm in a way it looks like the Hitler Salute it sounds pretty implausible if he claims he’s just doing empty handed front raises…
Hey:
“Hitora” in addition to “people” could be a biblical reference.