Gunkanjima 2001: My Travels to a Ghost Island

It's been a hectic start to the year, but I'm glad to be back and blogging again. Since January, I've launched a new Albert Cheung Photography website, and been busy booking 2011 weddings and completing product/editorial projects.

Project Gunkanjima has been on the backburner since my first post in 2008, but I found myself revisiting my travels to Japan in response to the recent devastation following Japan's earthquake and tsunami in March.

In the summer of 2001, I had the opportunity of backpacking Japan as part of a traveling Cornell architecture studio. While we were in Nagasaki, our professor took us on a side excursion to the island of Gunkanjima (Battleship Island in Japanese), a small outpost 15km off the coast of Nagasaki.
Gunkanjima had one of the highest population densities ever recorded. Established in the 19th century as a treasure for coal mining manufacturing, the island was evacuated in 1974 as quickly as it came, leaving behind a ghost city in the Pacific. It was illegal to visit the island, yet we still made it amidst a sly smuggling operation by my professor with 20 students onto a fishing boat.

Here are a few scans from my archives. Walking along the high concrete seawall was frightening; with the high winds, you could fall to near-certain death. You can still make out some of the buildings that used to house coal mining operations on the island. I took home a few artifacts - an x-ray from a dentist's office and child's workbook from a classroom (see below).

I'll definitely expound on the history in a following post, with more photos. Here's a documentary on the ghost island, from the viewpoint of a survivor returning to the island for the first time. Hashima (Gunkanjima) Island