[ISL] "The Rise and Fall of Japan's Most Densely Populated Island"

[rfmcdonald]

Bloomberg's Ken Jennings writes about Japan's Hashima Island, a now abandoned territory that at its mid-20th century peak was one of the densest settlements in the world.

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."

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.