I’m sure that many odd things have been seen through the windows of trains. Houses usually pass by so fast but often odd things can be seen from the corner of the your eye and your imagination fills in the rest. One such thing happened to me and caused me to doubt my sanity back when I first came to Japan.

On the ever crowded Odakyu Line, between Tsurukawa and Tamagawagakuen-mae, though the throng of people, I spied a strange house that looked like it was straight out of the film Laputa: Castle in the Sky. In that movie, the titular flying castle had a very interesting look. It was all overgrown and organic looking buildings. Not the kind of thing you expect to see in your usual Japanese town.

It took me about 2 years to believe it was actually there, any local I asked about it refused to admit the thing’s existance. As though it was some sort of conspiracy. Not only did it look like something out of a film but also like some sort of future house. You know, the houses they used to talk about on Tomorrow’s World. The ones that either had too many windows or none at all, or maybe they looked like a tree or some sort of cave.

The one you can spy from the train tracks is more the later. It looks like some big concreate dome with some sort of weird crow’s nest at the top. The design is all curvy and windowless, with little port holes at the bottom.

There is a university close by, so I assumed it was some sort of mad lecturer’s experiment. The other day, however, I finally walked up and took a closer look at it and found that this may not be the case. It appears to be inhabited like any other regular house.

So I have to ask you…. Why is it there? What does it do? Are people actually living there? Why are their barely any windows? What is going on?

Please internet, help me solve this mystery.