Gunkanjima, Or Battleship Island,

is a small abandoned island off the coast of Nagasaki, it is also known as Hashima Island,

all aerial photographs shot with drone by Jordy Meow, as it happens we have mentioned it a few times before, as at one time the island, with just a 1.2 km circumference, it was home to 5300 people, making it the most-densely populated city in the world, 

the island also featured in the Bond movie Skyfall, 

it was an island built on coal, the Mitsubishi Corporation purchased the mine for 100,000 yen, the now world-famous company had expanded rapidly after its inception as a shipping enterprise in 1873, and had purchased the Takashima Coal Mine in 1881, Hashima's annual coal production reached a peak of 410,000 tons in 1941, but there is a dark side to all of this, about 1,300 laborers had died on the island, some in underground accidents, others of illnesses related to exhaustion and malnutrition, still others had chosen a quicker, less gruesome death by jumping over the sea-wall and trying in vain to swim to the mainland, during its 84-year career under Mitsubishi, the island produced some 16.5 million tons of coal, and now the good news, the last resident stepped onto the ship for Nagasaki on 20 April 1974, for the full history and horror of the island have a look here as Suh Jung-woo, one of the Korean laborers fortunate enough to survive the ordeal, remembered Hashima in a 1983 interview,

although the island does offer tours, over 90% of the land is off limits due to risk of collapse, so today a change of perspective as these are all aerial photographs, the homes that were built there were feats of engineering. The multi-storied apartments were made from reinforced concrete–the first in Japan­–and built around the time when the technology was first being proven around the world, also Gunkanjima even had what is thought to be Japan’s first rooftop farm,

many thanks indeed to Jordy Meow for these fascinating photographs, so what happened to take the island from the most-densely populated city in the world to a totally deserted island? oil, coal was no longer needed, Gunkanjima shrank just as fast as it grew, operations officially ceased in 1974 and the last remaining residents left the island in April of that year, for almost 50 years the island has been slowly deteriorating, today just haunting images of what for many was hell on earth.