World’s most interesting forbidden places (part 3)
February 14th, 2007 by Brian
Hashima Island - Sometimes called “Ghost Island” or “Gunkanjima” (Battleship Island) Hashima Island is located in the Nagasaki Prefecture of Japan about 15 km from the city of Nagasaki. In 1890 Mitsubishi bought the island and established a coal mine there. The mine, which descended to the coal deposits on the sea bed was critical to Japan’s industrialization in the early part of the 20th century. Mitsubishi constructed an entire city on the island to house the mine workers. The city was mostly made out of concrete to prevent its destruction from typhoons (same thing as a hurricane.)
After World War II, and particularly in the 1950’s, Japan’s economy was growing at an incredible rate and energy needs were increasing. By 1959 Mitsubishi had moved so many workers into its little city that population density on Hashima Island grew to 835 people per hectare. That figure remains as the highest population density ever recorded on Earth. By 1974 oil had replaced coal as a primary energy source and the mine was shut down following a gradual decline through the late 1960’s. The island, being little more than a black slab of rock in the ocean at that point, was abandoned and remains that way to this day. Travel to the island is not allowed.Hashima Island seems to me like a modern day Easter Island. They are places abandoned when their resources were utterly exhausted. There’s a lesson here for the entire Earth but I’ll leave it to you to figure out what it is.
