Hashima Island: Japan's Abandoned Battleship Island

About 15 kilometers off the coast of Nagasaki, a small island rises from the sea, lined with crumbling concrete apartment towers and ringed by a high seawall. From a distance, its outline looks like a warship, which is how it got its nickname, Gunkanjima, "Battleship Island." Its official name is Hashima. The island owes its existence as a city to coal. Coal was discovered there around 1810, and from 1887 it was continuously inhabited as an undersea coal mine. In 1890, the Mitsubishi company bought the island. Mitsubishi expanded the mine and built seawalls and landfill, enlarging the island to about 6.3 hectares, roughly 16 acres. Miners went down shafts and worked seams deep beneath the seabed. To house the workers and their families, the company built upward. In 1916, the island got Japan's first reinforced-concrete apartment building. Over the following decades, more towers went up, along with schools, shops, a hospital, a cinema and rooftop gardens. In 1959, Hashima's population peaked at 5,259 people, about 83,500 people per square kilometer, which made it one of the most densely populated places ever recorded. The island also has a darker chapter. During World War II, Korean and Chinese laborers were brought to Hashima and forced to work in its mine under harsh and dangerous conditions. After the war, Japan's energy shifted from coal to petroleum. With the coal running low, Mitsubishi closed the mine in January 1974, and by April 20 of that year, the last residents had left. The island was abandoned, and for decades its buildings were battered by typhoons and salt spray. In 2009, Nagasaki City reopened a small southern section of the island to tour groups. In 2015, Hashima was inscribed as part of UNESCO's "Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution." The listing was controversial. South Korea objected because of the island's forced-labor history, and Japan agreed to acknowledge that history in how the sites were presented. In 2018, UNESCO's World Heritage Committee concluded that Japan had not yet done so, and a 2021 UNESCO review reached similar findings. Today the island's apartment blocks and mine buildings still stand in the sea, slowly decaying.