Hashima Island

Hashima, better known as Gunkanjima or Battleship Island, is a scrap of rock about 15 km from the centre of Nagasaki that was turned into one of the most densely populated places ever recorded. Coal was found here in the early 19th century, and from 1890, when Mitsubishi bought the island, it was worked by undersea mines while seawalls and landfill enlarged the ground to 6.3 hectares. Encased in its concrete walls and packed with tower blocks, the island looked from the sea like a warship, and the nickname came from its resemblance to the battleship Tosa.

To house the miners, the company built in concrete to withstand typhoons. A seven-storey apartment block of 1916 was Japan's first large reinforced-concrete building, and over the next half-century the island gained more apartment blocks, a school, a hospital, a town hall, a cinema, a swimming pool, shops, communal baths and rooftop gardens. In 1959 its population peaked at 5,259, a density of more than 800 people per hectare across the whole island. When oil replaced coal, the mine was closed in January 1974 and everyone had left by 20 April. The empty buildings have been decaying in the salt wind ever since; several have collapsed.

The island's history is also a painful one. From the 1930s to the end of the Second World War, conscripted Korean civilians and Chinese prisoners of war were made to work in the mine under brutal conditions, and estimates of the number who died on the island range from 137 to about 1,300. When Hashima was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2015 as part of the Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution, Japan undertook to explain this history; UNESCO reviews in 2021 and again in 2025 found that the explanation offered was still inadequate, and the matter remains unresolved.

Tourists land at a pier and follow a walkway through a small southern section of the island; more than 95 percent of it is off-limits because the buildings are unsafe. From the viewing areas you look at collapsed mine structures and the stacked apartment blocks rising behind them, and on the boat trip out you see the whole grey silhouette from the water.

Getting there

Several licensed operators run landing tours from Nagasaki Port, and tours have also left from Iōjima. Nagasaki Airport (NGS) is about 36 km from the island. Landings are cancelled when wind, waves or visibility exceed set limits (for example, waves over 0.5 m), which happens often, especially in summer, when a boat may sail without landing.