Visiting Hashima Island: The World’s Most Crowded Island

Visiting Hashima Island: The World's Most Crowded Island

Published: April 27th, 2024. Updated: 26th July, 2026.

In 1959, more people were packed onto Hashima Island’s sixteen acres of reclaimed rock than have ever lived at that density anywhere else on Earth, before or since. The number most often cited is 5,259 residents on a strip of concrete roughly 480 metres long and 160 metres wide, a density nine times that of central Tokyo at the time. Today the same island has a population of zero. Nobody has lived there since 1974.

That collapse, from the densest human settlement in recorded history to complete abandonment within fifteen years, is the reason Hashima Island draws visitors at all. What is Hashima Island, stripped of its nickname and its ruin photography? A former undersea coal mine off the coast of Nagasaki, owned for over a century by the Mitsubishi Corporation, built up rather than out because there was nowhere left to build out to. Understanding the place means understanding both halves of that arc: how a bare rock became a self-contained vertical city, and why that city could empty itself so completely, so fast, that the buildings are still standing exactly as their last residents left them.


A Rock Becomes a City

Coal was first noticed around Hashima in 1810, but serious mining did not begin until Mitsubishi took over operations in 1890. The company had worked out something that made the tiny island worth the trouble: rich coal seams ran beneath the surrounding seabed, and rather than shipping workers back and forth from the mainland every day, it made more sense to build a permanent settlement directly on top of the mine.

There was, however, almost no land to build on. The original outcrop measured a fraction of its later size. Mitsubishi solved this the way land-poor places have solved it since: it built outward. Between 1893 and around 1930, six successive rounds of seawall construction, using rubble hauled up from the mine shafts themselves, extended the island’s edges into a squared-off shape that, viewed from a passing ship, resembled a warship’s hull. That resemblance is where the nickname Gunkanjima, or Battleship Island, comes from. It was accurate enough that Allied forces reportedly mistook the silhouette for a genuine vessel during the war.

With nowhere to sprawl, the settlement had to grow vertically instead. In 1916, Mitsubishi completed what is generally recognised as Japan’s first large reinforced-concrete apartment building on the island, a response to a devastating typhoon that had shown wooden housing could not survive the exposed site. More concrete blocks followed over the following decades, stacked close enough that residents could walk between buildings on covered corridors without stepping outside. By the 1950s the island had schools, a cinema seating four hundred, a public bathhouse, a pachinko parlour, shops, and a rooftop area where residents kept the small gardens that gave the settlement its bitter local nickname, Midori Nashi Shima, the island without green.

Living conditions were, by the standards of the time, genuinely good for miners’ families. Television ownership on Hashima reportedly reached close to 100 percent by 1958, compared with roughly 8 percent nationally, at a time when a single set cost more than a month’s wages for many households. Wages in the mines were high enough to justify it. None of this erases what the work itself involved.


The Other Cost of the Coal

The island’s prosperity rested on labour that was not always freely given. During the Second World War, as Japan’s need for coal intensified and its available workforce thinned, Hashima’s mine drew on conscripted Korean labourers and, according to some sources, Chinese prisoners of war. Estimates of how many Koreans worked the mine during this period vary considerably, from several hundred to figures approaching a thousand, and the death toll among them is similarly disputed: Japanese sources have cited roughly 130 recorded deaths, while non-Japanese estimates run considerably higher. Some accounts describe men attempting to swim for the mainland rather than continue working the undersea shafts, an escape route that killed most who tried it.

This history became a matter of open diplomatic dispute after Hashima and twenty-two other Meiji-era industrial sites were added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2015. South Korea had initially opposed the listing on the grounds that several of the sites, including Hashima, relied on forced Korean labour; Japan secured its approval by pledging to present that history accurately at the sites themselves. According to contemporary accounts from journalists and researchers who have since visited, the information centre Japan eventually opened has instead featured testimony from former residents stating that no discrimination occurred, and the island’s own visitor materials pass over the years in question with comparatively little detail. In 2021, the UNESCO World Heritage Committee formally expressed regret that Japan had not fulfilled its earlier commitment. The dispute has not been resolved, and depending on which tour guide happens to be narrating a given crossing, visitors may hear the mine’s wartime history addressed directly, softened considerably, or barely mentioned at all.

It is difficult to imagine that a settlement built this densely, and this dependent on cheap and often coerced labour to keep it running, could have taken the exact same shape anywhere else. The seawalls, the vertical housing, the workforce drawn from occupied territory: each was a specific answer to Hashima’s specific problem of being a profitable coal seam under open water with nowhere convenient to put the people needed to work it.


When the Coal Ran Out

Hashima’s mine kept producing coal even as Japan’s postwar economy pivoted toward oil, in part because full mechanisation let output stay high with fewer workers. It was not enough. In January 1974, Mitsubishi announced the mine’s closure, and by April the same year the last residents had left. What had been a functioning town of roughly two thousand people, down from its 1959 peak, became uninhabited within a matter of months.

The suddenness of that departure is part of what makes the island unusual among abandoned industrial sites. People did not slowly drift away over a generation, taking their belongings with them piece by piece. They packed what they could carry onto departing boats and left the rest. Furniture, appliances, personal effects, and in places entire classrooms of schoolwork were simply abandoned in situ, and much of it stayed that way, undisturbed, because the island itself was closed to outside visitors for more than three decades afterward.


What Remains

Nagasaki City took over ownership from Mitsubishi in the early 2000s and reopened a limited section of the island to guided tours in 2009. What visitors see today is not the whole settlement but its edge: a network of observation walkways along the southern part of the island, from which the apartment blocks are visible but not enterable. The buildings closest to the sea have taken the worst of it. Decades of typhoons and salt spray have stripped away exterior plaster, buckled balconies, and in places brought entire sections of wall down, so that from certain angles the ruins look less like abandoned housing and more like the aftermath of an explosion, though nothing of the kind occurred. Building No. 30, the 1916 reinforced-concrete block that was Japan’s first of its kind, has continued to deteriorate visibly even in the years since tours began, and current guides often point to it as a marker of how quickly the site is changing.

Vegetation has done what it could not do while the island was occupied. Roots have worked into cracks in the seawall and the building foundations, and grass now grows in courtyards that residents once kept scrupulously bare of it. The contrast between the deliberate density of the built environment and the total absence of anyone maintaining it is, for most visitors, the single most disorienting part of standing there. This is a place that was engineered, block by block and corridor by corridor, to support close to six thousand people, and for half a century now it has supported none.

The island’s profile from the water, the reason for its nickname in the first place, is still the first thing most visitors register. Approaching by boat, the sea wall gives Hashima a fortified, prow-like outline that made it convincing enough as a warship silhouette to draw wartime attention, and that same shape now reads instead as something closer to a hull run aground, all momentum spent.


Why Hashima Still Draws Attention

Part of the interest is straightforwardly visual: the concrete-ruin aesthetic that has made the island a location scout’s favourite, including as the model for a villain’s hideout in a Bond film, and a subject for photographers drawn to decay and reclaimed space. But the more durable pull of the place is the paradox at its centre. Hashima was, for a few decades, one of the most intensely engineered pieces of human habitation on the planet, a place where an entire self-sufficient town was compressed onto a rock too small to comfortably hold it. Then it became, almost overnight, one of the most thoroughly empty places on the planet instead. Few sites let a visitor stand in one spot and feel the full distance between those two conditions so directly.

Whether that visit also confronts the island’s disputed wartime history depends largely on chance: which boat company, which guide, which day. The buildings themselves make no such distinction. The apartment blocks that housed miners’ families and the shafts that killed conscripted labourers stand within a few hundred metres of each other, and the concrete does not sort itself into comfortable and uncomfortable history. It simply continues, slowly, to fall.

Tourist Information

Location: Hashima, Takashima-cho, Nagasaki City, Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan, approximately 19 km (12 miles) southwest of Nagasaki Port.

Opening hours: The island has no fixed public opening hours, as it cannot be visited independently. Access is entirely through scheduled boat tours departing from Nagasaki Port, typically with morning and afternoon departures.

Typical visit duration: Around 2.5 to 3 hours total, including the boat crossing (roughly 40 to 50 minutes each way) and about 40 to 60 minutes ashore on the observation walkway.

How to get there: Independent and private-boat landings are prohibited. Visitors must book a seat with one of the licensed tour operators running from Nagasaki Port, most departing from terminals near the Ohato tram stop. For current ticket prices, schedules, and booking, consult the official websites of the licensed operators directly.

Admission: Not free. Prices and booking are handled by the individual licensed tour companies; consult their official websites for current fares and availability, as prices vary by operator and tour class.

Accessibility: Limited. The observation walkway involves stairs and uneven surfaces, and most operators note that the route is not suitable for wheelchair users or those with significant mobility restrictions. Contact operators directly to discuss individual needs. The boat crossing itself can be rough in poor weather, which may be a consideration for visitors prone to seasickness.

Facilities: Toilets and basic amenities are available at the Nagasaki Port terminals before departure. There are no facilities of any kind on Hashima Island itself.

Best time to visit: Landings depend entirely on sea conditions, and by some estimates successful landings happen on roughly 100 days of the year. Spring and autumn tend to offer calmer seas than the typhoon-prone summer months. Booking well ahead, and building flexibility into your Nagasaki itinerary in case of a weather cancellation, is strongly advised.

Things to know before visiting Hashima Island:

  • Landings can be cancelled at short notice due to high waves or wind, sometimes converting the trip into a cruise-only tour that circles the island without docking.
  • Visitors must stay on the designated walkway at all times; entering buildings or straying from the path is not permitted and is not physically possible in most areas due to structural risk.
  • Some operators require visitors to sign a safety pledge before boarding.
  • Not all tours include English-language narration; check in advance if this matters to you, and note that days and departure times for English or Chinese guides vary by operator.
  • Sturdy, flat shoes are recommended given the uneven walkway surfaces.

Nearby places of interest:

  • Nagasaki Peace Park and the Atomic Bomb Museum, in central Nagasaki.
  • Takashima Island, a stop on some Hashima tour routes, home to a coal museum with a scale model of Gunkanjima.
  • Glover Garden, a hillside collection of preserved Meiji-era Western residences overlooking Nagasaki Harbour.
  • Dejima, the reconstructed Edo-period trading post that was Japan’s sole window to the West for over two centuries.

Further Reading & Resources:

  • Books: Brian Burke-Gaffney, Hashima: The Ghost Island, a detailed English-language history of the mine and settlement.
  • Documentaries: NHK and various independent documentary features on Hashima’s coal-mining history and its postwar abandonment (search current streaming availability, as titles vary by region).
  • Films: Skyfall (2012), which used Hashima’s silhouette as inspiration for a fictional abandoned island set.
  • Museums: The Gunkanjima Digital Museum in Nagasaki city, and the Takashima Coal Mine Museum, both of which provide context unavailable on the island itself.
  • Official websites: The licensed Nagasaki tour operators’ own sites for current schedules, and Nagasaki City’s official tourism pages for general planning information.

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