Hashima Island
— the concrete city the sea is taking back.
Not only on a wall.
“The island is small, about six and a half hectares, ringed by a seawall and stacked with concrete apartment blocks. Mitsubishi opened the undersea coal seam in 1890 and closed it in 1974. At its peak the island held more than five thousand workers and their families, the densest population on earth. The pumps stopped the day the last shift left. Forty years of typhoons have done the rest. Visitors now land on a small jetty for forty minutes.
Hashima Island, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Hashima Island, also called Gunkanjima for its battleship silhouette, lies about 15 kilometres southwest of Nagasaki in the East China Sea. The island covers roughly 6.3 hectares and sits about 480 metres long by 160 metres wide. Mitsubishi acquired it in 1890 to work an undersea coal seam, expanding the original outcrop with seven successive land reclamations. Japan's first reinforced concrete apartment block, Building 30, was completed there in 1916. The mine closed on January 15, 1974, and the island was abandoned the same year.
Almost every structure on the island is poured reinforced concrete, chosen in 1916 because timber could not withstand the typhoons that strike the East China Sea each autumn. Building 30, the seven-storey miners' apartment block on the south end, is the earliest large reinforced concrete residence in Japan. The seawall, built in successive campaigns from 1907, encloses the entire perimeter and gives the island its battleship outline. Salt, wind, and four decades without maintenance have stripped the concrete to its rusted rebar across most facades; collapse rates accelerated after 2000.
Hashima reopened to visitors in April 2009 after thirty-five years of closure, accessible only by licensed boat tour from Nagasaki harbour. Several operators run twice-daily landings, conditions permitting, and the crossing takes about fifty minutes each way. Tourists land on a small concrete jetty on the southeast side and stay on a marked walkway about 220 metres long; the interior of the island is closed for safety. Tours cancel often in winter and during typhoon season. UNESCO listed the island in 2015 as part of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution Sites.