Published in Acumen August 2016
The ideas that ruins invoke in me are grand. Everything comes to nothing, everything perishes, only the world remains, only time endures. Denis Diderot, from The Salon of 1767.
The Jetavana temple bells ring the passing of all things. Opening lines of The Tale of the Heike.
Hashima is a tiny island twenty kilometers off Nagasaki, on the western flank of Kyushu. Just 480 metres in length and 160 metres across, it once housed a thriving mining community of five thousand souls. In its early 1960s heyday the island – nicknamed Gunkanjjima, or “Battleship Island”, on account of its shape – boasted a population density nine times greater than metropolitan Tokyo, then the most densely populated city in the world.
Today Gunkanjima is uninhabited. The mining equipment and living quarters have been left to crumble and rust in the salty air. Winds gust through gaping windows and rubble-strewn alleys that once echoed with children’s voices. In this modern-day Pompeii, some ghostly apartments still contain black-and-white TV sets, stopped clocks, bottles, cups and faded photos of forgotten stars.
The last miner downed tools just forty two years ago, but the place is already as defunct as the marble fragments that inspired Diderot and other thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In Japan and elsewhere many industrial sites have been remade into business parks or housing developments, but once Gunkanjima’s coal became uncompetitive the island was done. The facilities remain intact because it wasn’t worth demolishing them.
Recently this thoroughly modern ruin has become a new kind of tourist destination. In 2015, UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage site, over the opposition of South Korea, which cited the forced labour of Korean nationals in the mines in the last years of the Second World War.
The island’s photogenic quality has already been noticed by film-makers. In 2012 it was used as the model for the “Dead City,” the villain’s lair in the 007 movie, Skyfall. Three years later it became the setting for Attack of the Titans, the film version of a dystopian Japanese manga which has sold over 50 million copies.
A VERY VERTICAL SOCIETY
Gunkanjima is well worth visiting for anyone interested in modern Japanese history, particularly the breakneck industrialization of the early twentieth century. Even now the ambition and prowess of the unknown architects and engineers are breath-taking, as is the fortitude of the community for whom the wind-and-wave battered island became a multi-storey “hometown” where people were born and brought up, spent their working lives and died.
Coal was discovered on the island’s surface in 1810 and exploited by the dominant Saga clan. But it was not until the closing decades of the nineteenth century that Japan’s ravenous appetite for coking coal, the basic fuel of the fast expanding steel industry, justified opening shafts into the sea-bed. Brought under the control of the Mitsubishi group, the island had to be expanded in area by three times to accommodate the people and machinery necessary for large-scale extraction. The Gunkanjima we see today is largely an artificial creation.
Erosion-resistant stone, imported from China, protected the facilities from the elements. Without these sea-walls life – and profit – would have been impossible. Even so there were occasions when typhoon-driven waves crashed onto the island, causing widespread flooding, especially in lower level apartments facing the sea. Needless to say the mining company’s top executives lived on the highest floors. It was in every sense a vertical society.
In its time Gunkanjima represented modernity and leading edge technology. An undersea cable brought electricity to the island in 1907. Japan’s first reinforced concrete apartment block was built there in 1916. The island had its own schools, beauty salon, top-class medical facilities, a pachinko parlour, even a love hotel for amorous couples. The cinema, opened in 1927, is a pile of rubble now, but the torii gate of a Shinto shrine still perches on the island’s highest point. The only amenity lacking was a crematorium. The dead were taken to a facility on a larger neighbouring island and came back as ashes.
At peak production the miners dug half a million tons of coal a year – a modest amount compared to “superpits” in the UK and elsewhere, but impressive for such a confined area. The deepest seams were a thousand metres below sea-level and the longest tunnels stretched two kilometers.
Conditions were gruelling. The elevator that took the miners down to the lower depths was an open-sided cage that plunged six hundred pitch-black metres in eighty seconds. Shifts were eight-to-ten hours in sweltering heat of 40 C ° and up to 90% humidity. Just getting to the coalface could take over an hour. For ordinary workers – as opposed to the management, who had a supply of fresh water brought in from the mainland – baths consisted of treated seawater.
Yet there were compensations. Wages were double and treble the national average. Rent was free and electricity fees minimal. The standard of living can be gauged from the consumer goods left to moulder in the apartments; elaborate hi-fi sets, bulky fridges and washing machines. An undersea phone cable was laid as early as 1938 and by the 1960s the roofs were forests of TV aerials.
Gunkanjima was known as “the island without greenery”, but the residents imported soil from the mainland and created rooftop gardens. As in any Japanese community there were regular festivals at the shrine. Professional entertainers would come to give concerts and there were bars for the hard-drinking miners to relax in after their shifts were over.
THE DEAD CITY LIVES ON
Why was the island abandoned so suddenly? The standard reason is the “energy revolution” which led to the replacement of coal by imported oil. As an explanation that seems inadequate since Gunkanjima supplied coking coal and, furthermore, the closure came shortly after the first oil shock sent oil prices soaring. Most unusually, the mine was still profitable when it closed.
Then as now Japan’s energy policy was in the hands of the Ministry of the Economy, Trade and Industry (previously called the Ministry of International Trade and Industry). Decisions could be highly political, such as the choice of an outmoded American nuclear reactor for Fukushima in 1969, a time of worsening trade friction. Still, small-scale deep mining had no future in Japan. Gunkanjima was never going to make it into the twenty first century as a functioning mine. After eighty years of operation it had done its job.
Now it has secured a brand-new job, in the heritage business. When Diderot wrote about ruins, he took it for granted they were the ancient remnants of bygone civilizations. It would not have occurred to him to apply the term to constructions in use within living memory. It is a defining feature of our own time that it produces ruins of many kinds – architectural, technological and social – as a matter of course. Disruption, discontinuity and obsolescence are baked in the cake.
In that sense Gunkanjima is not some anomalous left-over from a vanished era, but a perfect symbol of today’s world, with its insatiable appetite for novelty and blindness to what is lost. It is also a useful reminder that everything familiar to us will one day be obsolescent too, ourselves included. As British art critic Brian Dillon writes in A Short History of Decay, the ruin is a fragment with a future; it will live on without us.
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