Hashima: the island that ran out of people

Hashima is a small island about fifteen kilometres from the city of Nagasaki, in southern Japan. It is barely six hectares — about sixteen acres — and for most of the twentieth century it was one of the most densely populated places on the planet. Then, quite suddenly, it was empty. Nobody has lived there since 1974.

An island built on coal

Coal was discovered at Hashima around 1810, and the island was continuously inhabited from 1887. In 1890 the Mitsubishi company bought it and began mining in earnest, sinking four main shafts that reached as much as a kilometre below the sea. Between 1891 and 1974, around 15.7 million tons of coal were taken out of the island.

To house the workforce, Mitsubishi built upward. In 1916 the island got Japan's first large reinforced-concrete apartment building, a seven-storey block for miners. At its peak, in 1959, Hashima held 5,259 people packed into an area the size of a football pitch — a population density of more than 800 people per hectare.

The island's darker history

The island's prosperity rested partly on forced labour. From the 1930s until the end of the Second World War, Korean and Chinese labourers were brought to Hashima to work in the mines under harsh conditions. Estimates of the number who died there range widely, from around 137 to more than a thousand.

That history is now central to how Hashima is remembered and discussed — and it is why the island's UNESCO World Heritage listing in 2015, as part of the Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution, was accompanied by difficult and continuing debate.

Emptied in months

The mine closed in January 1974, as Japan's energy economy shifted away from coal. The island was cleared by 20 April 1974. In a matter of months, a place that had held thousands of people became completely empty — and then stayed that way for thirty-five years.

Tourists were allowed back in 2009, and more than ninety-five per cent of the island is still off-limits because the buildings are so dangerous. The concrete blocks are collapsing, and the sea is slowly reclaiming the edges. Hashima has also had an unexpected second life on screen, appearing in the 2012 James Bond film Skyfall.

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Related places

If this one stayed with you, these entries sit in the same corner of the archive:

• Pripyat: the city that was evacuated in a day — Ukraine
• The pool where nobody swims: Timișoara's abandoned lido — Romania
• Barmaz: the Alpine hamlet that emptied in a single winter — Italy