Gunkan-jima Island - Nagasaki, Japan

[Yokosuka Mike]

My wife and I recently visited Nagasaki, Japan. One of the places we visited while we were there was Gunkan-jima Island. To go to Gunkan-jima Island one needs to make a reservation in advance via the internet to ride a tour cruise boat. It's a 15 kilometer trip to the island and it takes about 40 minutes to get there.

Gunkan-jima Island is 6.3-hectare (16-acre) in size and was known for its undersea coal mines. Established in 1887 the mine operated during the industrialization of Japan. A city was built on the island to house and support the miners and their families. The island reached a peak population of 5,259 in 1959. In 1974, with the coal reserves nearing depletion, the mine was closed and all of the residents departed soon after, leaving the island abandoned. Nowadays it's a tourist attraction. On calm days the tour boat can dock on the island and tourists can have limited access to walk around and sight see. On the day that we went there it was to rough to dock. FYI: Gunkan-jima Island is nicknamed Battleship Island because that's what it looks like from a distance.

Here are a few images from our tour. The first image was taken with a Fujifilm X-E5 and XF35mm f1.4 lens. The other pictures were taken with a Fujifilm X100VI.








All the best,
Mike

 

[Archiver]

I've read about that island! Some urbex people have snuck onto this island and taken photos there.

Gunkanjima, Hashima Island

We got on the little boat. As soon as we left the coast, our driver shut down all the lights. Excitation is getting higher. And we can recognize Gunkanjima even in the total darkness.

offbeatjapan.com

 

[lynnb]

The first thing I thought of when looking at these pictures was Skyfall, the James Bond movie.

 

[Bolo Kukus]

This is the sort of place photographers dream about...

In my time I've lucked into several such places, in the '70s when I was young and freewheeling around Asia with an old SLR and two lenses in a backpack. Now with digital gear the going is easier and the backpack lighter, a blessing to elderly travellers.

One find was an old shipyard in Keelung, Taiwan. Now I believed repurposed and the main seaport in that country, its location being handy to mainland China and so an ideal location for extensive ongoing export-import trade even with the volatile political relationship between the two countries.

Another was the old port area in Sabang, on the fairly remote island of Wei at the northern tip of Banda Aceh in Sumatra. There the colonial Dutch built a large seaport in the 1880s partly as a coal station for passing ships both civilian and military, and to handle exports and imports from the Netherlands East Indies to Europe. The facilities were largely abandoned after WW2 and languished mostly as unused and decaying buildings 'til ca 1970 when Indonesia renovated the entire old port into a new, modern facility. A photographer I met in Singapore in 1972 told me about those abandoned rows of old warehouses and offices and I made plans to somehow get to Aceh and visit this island, but at that time this was too great an effort. Wei island is +/- 20 km at sea and getting there in the '70s would have meant a long ferry journey. So I passed, to my regret.

The larger container ports in all the coastal Asian cities have almost entirely replaced the once-thriving smaller and older seaport areas. Sadly, it's inevitable that these now mostly redundant facilities are demolished to make way for yet more container warehouses. Time passes and so-called progress takes over.

Again, my apologies to you Mr Y, for having yet again hijacked your thread...

(Added later - I've re-edited my post for brevity to try to stay on-topic in this thread about Yokohama.)

 

[Bolo Kukus]

As I meant to write, but as usual got carried away with my old memories and my usual hyper rhetoric...

Super good photography as always, Mr Yokohama. Especially your last image, which for me evoked memories of photographs of pre-First World War battleships I've seen in books. Good one!!

 

[JeffS7444]

Amazing! I had heard of it, but have never visited the Nagasaki region. I found a Gunkan-Jima museum web site with historical photos. My mind boggles at the thought of such high population density.
＜公式＞軍艦島デジタルミュージアム 長崎の世界遺産、軍艦島を最先端の技術で再現

 

[hermank]

Narahara Ikko ( 1931 - 2020 ) had his first solo exposition ‘Human Land’ in 1956 at the Matsushima Gallery, Ginza, at that time the only gallery devoted to photography in Tokyo.
In this he showed ‘Hajima’, a man-made island, famous for its coalmine. The island, surrounded by a thirty-foot concrete wall, is popularly called ‘Warship Island’. (Gunkanjima)

Asahi Camera - Herman-Fotografie

herman-fotografie.nl

 

[Taipei-metro]

well, for Battleship Island; Hashima Island, 端島 (the Front Island ) is 'interesting' for photographers, it's history was 'Not pretty', Thousands of
Korean and Chinese prisoner of war and forced labors worked the harsh undersea coal mine...( it was called, Hell on Earth )

2017 Korean movie about Hashima,


Korean Arirang news on Hashima, Battleship Island,


American take on Battleship Island,


well, in Aug 1945, 'Fat Man' nuked the nearby Nagasaki City, (with 65,000 civilians immediate death), then workers of Battleship Island were send to clean up the aftermath
( radiations anyone )...

Yes i like to visit Battleship Island, i was in Osaka before...