Forgotten Places
Japan
The most densely populated place on Earth, abandoned overnight. Nothing inside has been touched.
The Forgotten Atlas — Field Report
The most densely populated place on Earth, abandoned overnight. Nothing inside has been touched.
At its peak in 1959, Hashima Island had a population density of 83,500 people per square kilometre — the highest ever recorded anywhere on Earth. On a concrete island barely 480 metres long and 160 metres wide, Mitsubishi had built a complete city: apartment blocks, a school, a hospital, a cinema, a pachinko parlour, a swimming pool, a rooftop garden. Over 5,000 people lived, worked, were born, went to school, fell in love, and died on this single concrete platform in Nagasaki Bay. The coal mine underneath them extended two kilometres under the seabed.
Hashima is the most concentrated argument for and against modernity I have ever encountered in a single place. Everything humans can do — build, crowd, work, live — compressed into one island.
The Forgotten Atlas
When petroleum replaced coal as Japan's primary energy source, the Hashima mine became uneconomical. Mitsubishi closed it on January 15, 1974. The 2,000 remaining residents were given notice and within three months the island was empty. They left quickly, taking little. The school desks are still in the classrooms. The furniture is still in the apartments. The swimming pool still has water in it. The concrete is cracking under decades of salt air and typhoons, and the buildings are collapsing in slow motion.
Hashima can be visited on a boat tour from Nagasaki. The visit is circumscribed — you land at designated viewing platforms and cannot enter the buildings, which are structurally dangerous — but what you can see from the platforms is extraordinary. The apartment blocks rising above the sea wall, their facades crumbling. The rooftop water tanks still standing. The school building losing its floors one by one to gravity. The whole island looking from the sea like a battleship, which is why the Japanese call it Gunkanjima — Battleship Island.
Tours run from Nagasaki port. Allow half a day. Combine with the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, one of the most important and moving museums in Japan.
Japan's first large-scale reinforced concrete buildings. Designed to withstand typhoons. Now slowly losing that battle.
Visible from the viewing platforms. The desks still in rows. The blackboards still on the walls.
The concrete wall that makes the island habitable. Walking along its base, looking up at the vertical city above, is the defining Hashima experience.
Stay and eat in Nagasaki, which has one of the most distinctive regional cuisines in Japan — heavily influenced by Chinese and Dutch traders.
Nagasaki's fusion cuisine that blends Japanese, Chinese, and European cooking. A unique product of the city's trading history. Try Hamakatsu for the best version.
Nagasaki's signature dish. Thick noodles in a rich pork and seafood broth. Not ramen. Better.
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