At the height of it’s working life, Hashima - often called Gunkanjima due to it’s ocean top resemblance to a battleship - was home to over five thousand people , and was the most densely populated place on earth, with one person every 1.5 metres it made the likes of Tokyo and Rio de Janeiro seem more like the sparse dunes of northern Africa.

This island, resting off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan, was just a reef when it was discovered to have large quantities of coal in 1870, and remained largely unaffected until the Mitsubishi company bought out the nascent excavation operation and the island itself in 1890. These were interesting times for Japan, newly open to the world following the Meiji reforms, and desperate to modernise and industrialise in step with the big powers in the west. Gunkanjima was a small part of this wider movement, but without doubt would have played an important role in supplying coal to fulfil Japan’s fast growing energy demands.

The island existed as a mining community until 1974, enduring two world wars, the pacific war, fires, the wholescale employment of cheaper, Korean miners and countless industrial accidents until the coal quite literally dried up, and Mitsubishi ceased operations in the seventies. Some of the employees were offered new jobs on the mainland, others were simply forced to move away from the island because without the coal mine, there was nothing keeping people there. The island went from a bustling micro-community to an abandoned township in a matter of weeks.

Gunkanjima stands now as a relic, untouched and uninhabited for over 30 years, it is a concrete mass slowly decaying into the ocean. It’s imposing sea defences a front to the worlds first concrete tenement buildings which are now little more than room after room of rotting tatami and the occasional hint of the lives which used to exist there. People left to grab one of the precious few jobs on offer elsewhere, and as such left behind them such cumbersome luxuries as childrens toys, television sets and musical instruments.

Since it’s abandonment, Gunkanjima has been off-limits, with all travel to the island prohibited, save for a few research trips in the intervening thirty-three years. I’m hoping that I will be on one of these such trips in the not too distant future. Nagasaki is a short train journey from my home in Fukuoka, and if I can get permission to travel to the island, I will be there to try and decipher what life was like for the people who called it home. I have to create an Oral Dossier for my university back in England, and depending on how difficult this place proves to be getting to, I want to do it on this.

Please take a look at the photos on this website of the island, you’ll soon see why I find it so fascinating: Photo Essay