At Japan’s westernmost tip, 505 uninhabited islands dot
the Sea of Japan. One of them, Hashima Island, was purchased by Mitsubishi
Motors in 1890 when coal was discovered there. The company built a giant
rectangular seawall around the island, to protect it from typhoons, and as a
result, the island is still called Gunkanjima in Japanese – “Battleship
Island”.
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In the 1950s, Hashima Island was the most densely
populated place on earth.
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Huge apartment towers, Japan's first big concrete
buildings, were built to house the army of workers that Hashima's mine
required. By 1959, there were 5,259 people living there, on a footprint smaller
than many sports stadiums. That gave the island a population density of over
216,000 residents per square mile, more crowded than any other island in the
world.
In 1974, Mitsubishi shut down
the mine. Japan's coal industry had collapsed due to the country's switch to
petroleum. Within a few months, the entire island was completely deserted: a
vertical concrete ghost town where desks still sat in schoolrooms, furniture
and TV sets still in apartments.
The Island was formally approved
as UNESCO World Heritage Site in July 2015, as part of Japan’s Sites of Japan’s
Meiji Industrial Revolution; Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal Mining.
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| HASHIMA ISLAND, JAPAN |
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