军舰岛：长崎外海上，一座曾经比东京还挤的岛

Off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan, there is a very small island. From afar, it looks like a battleship anchored at sea. It is called Hashima, but everyone calls it Battleship Island.

The island is only six hectares, roughly the size of a few football fields. Yet in 1959, more than 5,200 people lived there. On average, more than 800 people were crowded into every hectare, making it the most densely populated place in the world at the time. The reason was that there was coal beneath the island. The Mitsubishi company had been mining there for over eighty years starting from 1890. To house the miners, the island was filled with reinforced concrete buildings. The one built in 1916 was one of Japan's earliest large-scale reinforced concrete apartment buildings. Buildings were stacked layer upon layer, and schools, hospitals, shops, movie theaters, and shrines were all crammed into this small space. Children played in courtyards on the rooftops, some families grew vegetables on the terraces, and one corridor was like one street.

When a typhoon came, waves would sweep over the breakwater and crash against the upper floors.

In January 1974, as the coal was nearly exhausted, Mitsubishi announced the closure of the mine. By April, the last group of people on the island left by boat, and within a few months, the island was empty. According to those who have photographed it, much of the furniture and daily necessities from back then were left just as they were in the rooms.

For more than thirty years after that, almost no one set foot on the island. Wind and rain caused half the buildings to collapse, and rust dyed everything a reddish-brown. In 2009, the island was reopened to tourists, and in 2015 it was listed as a World Heritage Site.

However, the history of this island has always been controversial. Koreans and Chinese both say that during the war, large numbers of forcibly conscripted laborers did hard labor in the tunnels beneath the island, and many died there. When the Japanese government applied for World Heritage status, it was also required to clarify this part of its history.

Today, tourists who take a boat to the island follow a designated route, look around, and then have to leave. The buildings on the island collapse a little more every year.

#Paranormal #网络转载 #废墟