Hashima Ghost Island

In 1890, the Japanese Mitsubishi Corporation built a veritable fortress of concrete and steel on the tiny island of Hashima, near Nagasaki.

The island was turned into a powerful industrial center and became home to thousands of miners and their families.

People lived here in conditions of terrible density – on the island, the length of which is only 480 meters, in 1959 lived 5259 people.

Under the island were deep mines, going hundreds of meters under the ocean floor. Miners descending into the underwater tunnels extracted coal for industrialized Japan.

Both ordinary workers and forcibly mobilized Koreans and Chinese during World War II worked here.

However, by the 1970s, Japan’s coal industry began to decline due to the shift to other energy sources such as oil.

In 1974, the mine was closed, and the island was completely abandoned.

Today, Hashima is an uninhabited ghost island that has become a popular tourist attraction and has been used as a location for filming various movies.