BRICK BY BRICK

HASHIMA AND THE DREAM OF INDUSTRIAL MODERNISM

MICHI SHIMA

October 9, 2025

Hashima—once a hive of industrial ambition and now a hollow monument of concrete—stands as Japan’s most haunting relic of modernity. This essay traces the island’s transformation from coal-fueled utopia to spectral ruin, reading its dense architecture as both prophecy and epitaph for industrial modernism.

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From a distance, Hashima appears less like an island than a mirage. A gray slab rising from the East China Sea, its perimeter ringed by concrete seawalls that resemble fortress battlements. The ferry from Nagasaki takes forty minutes, but time behaves differently on the approach. The air thickens. The water darkens. Then the outline sharpens into a geometry that seems designed not by humans but by the logic of exhaustion itself, a topography of ruin rendered in right angles.

It is June 2025, and the sea is uncharacteristically calm. The guide speaks in a low, rehearsed voice about typhoons and mining and UNESCO recognition, his tone so neutral it seems a form of reverence. The tourists listen, half out of respect, half from the knowledge that they are about to visit a place that no longer quite exists. From the deck, cameras already rise. The first photographs are taken before the ferry has even moored.

Up close, Hashima looks like the skeleton of a city that outlived its inhabitants. Rows of apartment blocks tilt slightly inward, as though bowing toward a vanished center. Rusted staircases curl upward like fossilized tendons. Salt has eaten into the concrete, opening veins of black and green. The island’s once-straight edges have softened into geological accident. Everything here feels both ancient and unfinished, an experiment paused mid-sentence.

The Japanese call it Gunkanjima, Battleship Island, for the way its shape mimics a warship adrift in the sea. The nickname was earned during its years of prosperity, when more than five thousand people lived on this tiny piece of rock barely 480 meters long. At its peak in 1959, it was among the most densely populated places on Earth. Now it is entirely empty, though not silent. The sea murmurs at the walls, the wind drags through broken windows, and the echoes of a vanished future linger like static.

Miners descended beneath the sea to keep the lights of modernity burning.

Hashima was born from coal, the substance that powered Japan’s leap into the modern world. Mitsubishi purchased the island in 1890, carving tunnels deep beneath the seabed. The first dwellings were wooden barracks, quickly destroyed by typhoons and rebuilt in a stronger form. By 1916, Japan’s first large-scale reinforced-concrete apartment block had risen on the island: Building No. 30, nine stories tall, a marvel of vertical efficiency. It was an architecture of necessity, yet in retrospect it looks like prophecy, a century’s worth of urban aspiration compressed into a few hundred square meters of sea rock.

Unlike the glass towers of Tokyo or Osaka, Hashima’s architecture evolved by accretion, not plan. Each new structure grew from the needs of the mine below: shafts, conveyors, dormitories, power stations, and schools. The result was an accidental totality, an industrial organism that could sustain itself entirely except for air and food. The island’s population worked, slept, and died within a closed circuit. The ocean was both barrier and perimeter; beyond it, the world merely shimmered in heat and distance.

Seen from above, the city resembled a computer’s motherboard. From within, it felt like a machine. Every apartment the same, every corridor echoing the same rhythm of boots, buckets, and voices. Yet within this mechanical symmetry, life insisted in small ruptures. Children played on rooftops turned into playgrounds. At night, cinema screens flickered against the raw concrete of the assembly hall. The workers descended before dawn, vanishing into the tunnels that reached three hundred meters beneath the sea, and returned covered in coal dust—walking, some said, as if they had come back from another planet.

The dream of industrial modernism was always to make life efficient, measurable, predictable. Hashima achieved it to perfection, and the perfection was unbearable. There was no privacy, no escape, only routine. The sea surrounded everything like a reminder of both freedom and futility. To live on Hashima was to inhabit the dream of progress so completely that it became indistinguishable from confinement.

Industrial modernism, at its core, believed in the moral authority of materials. Form followed function. Concrete was truth. Ornament was a lie. Yet in Hashima, these convictions were not aesthetic but existential. Reinforced concrete was the only material capable of resisting the twin pressures of typhoons above and saltwater below. The beauty that emerged from this necessity was unintentional: a beauty of erosion, of repetition, of exposed structure. Every window, beam, and balcony served a purpose, and because it served a purpose, it endured.

In Europe, the rhetoric of modernism was philosophical. In Hashima, it was simply survival. But necessity, repeated long enough, produces its own grandeur. The weathered facades of Building No. 65, streaked with black salt and moss, possess a melancholy symmetry that no architect could have designed. The lines are too exact, the decay too eloquent. Even now, fifty years after abandonment, the forms remain articulate. They seem to speak the language of pure structure, the syntax of the inhuman.

To walk through these corridors is to feel modernism stripped of optimism. What remains is its skeleton: rational, austere, indifferent. The logic of the mine seeps upward into the logic of the apartments. The island’s geometry is a diagram of the industrial mind: linear, compartmentalized, closed. It is the rational world brought to its ultimate conclusion, a world so complete it no longer needs humans to inhabit it.

Mid-century domesticity, twenty kilometers offshore. Progress always looked most ordinary just before it became impossible.

And yet, for seventy years, people did live here. Children were born, marriages were arranged, neighbors quarreled over noise or laundry or the faint smell of fish. There was a hospital, a barber, a school, a temple. Photographs from the 1950s show men in white shirts and hats walking along narrow alleys, women pushing carts filled with rice, boys leaning against railings, squinting into the light. They look both ordinary and impossibly distant, like characters from a forgotten film reel.

Life on Hashima was lived vertically. The higher the floor, the closer one was to the wind. Residents describe the sound of storms as physical: the pressure of air forcing its way through cracks in the concrete. In summer, the rooms grew unbearably hot; in winter, salt crystals formed on the windows. Still, the community functioned with mechanical precision. Work shifts changed every eight hours. The school bell rang exactly at seven. Electricity flickered through cables that never slept. The mine below pulsed like a second heart.

There is something paradoxically tender in the scale of the domestic against the scale of the industrial. In the face of the machine, people improvised rituals of normality. They planted vegetables in tin cans, painted walls pale blue, and kept pets that often died quickly from the dust. When the typhoon of 1964 hit, families gathered in stairwells with flashlights, listening as waves smashed against the seawalls. The next morning, the island was still standing, which seemed proof that their way of life was invincible. It wasn’t.

In February 1974, oil had replaced coal as the engine of the world economy. Mitsubishi announced the mine’s closure. Within days, the population began to leave. Belongings were left behind: books, shoes, photographs, cups. The departure was so sudden that some homes still looked inhabited. The last ferry left in April of the same year. Then the sea reclaimed the silence.

Industry’s lullaby: the rhythmic exhale of a civilization that mistook productivity for permanence.

To understand Hashima, one must understand the peculiar fervor of the modern. Industrial modernism was not only an aesthetic movement; it was a theology of progress. It believed that human order could be inscribed into matter, that the future could be built with the same precision as a machine. Concrete was its scripture, steel its sacrament.

In Japan, this belief took on a special intensity. The country’s modernization had been telescoped into a few decades: from feudal isolation to industrial empire. Hashima was one of its earliest miracles, a microcosm of that transformation, floating on the sea like proof of the nation’s will to modernity. Every wall, every pipe, every sleeping quarter testified to a collective ambition: to master nature by enclosing it.

But belief is fragile. Once the economic rationale disappeared, the faith dissolved. What remained was the infrastructure of a vanished conviction. The concrete still stands, but the ideology that made it meaningful has evaporated. The island endures as a monument to the moment when human progress still seemed self-evident, before the future became uncertain.

An apartment block turned mausoleum for geometry. Modernism, stripped of optimism, still holds excellent posture.

If one looks closely, faint traces of another dream can be seen here, a premonition of the Japanese Futurism that would later emerge in art and architecture. The MAVO artists of the 1920s (think Dada in Japan) had already imagined the city as a dynamic collision of forms, movement, and light. Their untamed collages and constructions mirrored the very aesthetic Hashima would later embody: fragmentation, repetition, chaos and order, the beauty of machinery in motion.

Decades later, the so-called Metabolists would speak of cities as living organisms, capable of growth and decay. Their megastructures proposed flexibility where Hashima had enforced confinement. Yet the resemblance is haunting. The same faith in technology, the same fascination with modularity and density, the same refusal to distinguish between the organic and the mechanical. Hashima can be seen as the unacknowledged ancestor of that vision: the embryonic form of the machine city that Japan would later dream of making humane.

In the Metabolists’ renderings, cities float on water, expand in cells, mutate with population. On Hashima, the mutation has already occurred, only in reverse. What they theorized as future adaptability exists here as fossilized past. The architecture is not alive but petrified. The modular dream has turned to sediment. The organism persists, but only as ruin.

Stairs to nowhere. The island’s unofficial monument to upward mobility.

If J. G. Ballard had invented Hashima in one of his books, it would have been dismissed as allegory—too precise, too on the nose. A city built for workers deep under the sea, abandoned after industrial collapse, left to rot within sight of the mainland, like a parable of modernity’s terminal stage. Yet standing on the island, one realizes that Ballard didn’t invent this landscape. If anything, he merely anticipated it. The future he described in The Drowned World (1962) and High-Rise (1975) already existed here, quietly corroding in the salt air.

Hashima is Ballard’s imagination made literal: the dream of progress eroded into beauty, technology receding into ruin. It is a place where modernism completes its life cycle and begins to decay into something poetic. The clean lines of the architecture, once symbols of precision, now serve as canvases for corrosion. The repetition of windows turns into a visual mantra. The absence of people becomes a form of purity. This is the paradox of all modern ruins: They are most beautiful when they have lost their function.

Hashima exists outside of time, or rather in a time of its own making: neither past nor present, but suspended in the slow process of disintegration. The guide’s voice, the tourists’ cameras, the ropes that mark the safe path—all seem temporary compared to the permanence of decay.

The mind begins to project narratives into the emptiness. One imagines the inhabitants still here, their routines continuing invisibly. A miner descending into an invisible shaft, a child running across a roof now sagging. The island’s architecture invites hallucination. Its symmetry suggests design even in ruin. The longer one looks, the more it feels like a machine still operating—not for production, but for memory.

Hashima’s beauty lies in its refusal to disappear. It resists erasure by embodying it. The salt that eats the walls also preserves them. The very forces that destroy the island are the same that make it sublime. In the harsh light of afternoon, the concrete glows pale gold, like old film stock. Shadows fall cleanly across the balconies, as if the architecture were still waiting to be inhabited. The sea, endlessly indifferent, reflects the ruins with cinematic precision.

This is not nostalgia. It is something colder, the aesthetic of entropy. The same fascination that drives photographers to Detroit’s factories or classrooms in Chernobyl draws them here. They document the aftermath of human purpose. Each image is an elegy disguised as evidence. Yet Hashima differs from those other ruins in one crucial way: It is the product of not accident or disaster, but completion. Its end was planned, its abandonment logical. In that sense, it represents not failure but fulfillment. The system worked until it didn’t need to anymore.

Broadcasting ceased decades ago, but the room still receives every frequency of absence.

Perhaps that is why the island exerts such magnetic calm. It is the rare place where modernity feels concluded. There is no promise of revival, no pretense of renewal. The future has already happened here, and it left behind something unexpectedly serene: a landscape of exhausted intention.

From the ferry, Nagasaki glimmers faintly on the horizon: cranes, apartment towers, neon. Japan’s modernity continues, amplified and abstracted. The high-speed train, the corporate tower, the efficient city. Yet Hashima remains the truest monument to that story because it embodies its entire arc: ambition, achievement, abandonment. The country that once built vertically toward industrial glory now contemplates horizontality, the calm surface of the sea.

Some visitors see tragedy; others see design. Architects speak of conservation, engineers of safety, tourists of eeriness. Yet the island resists interpretation. It is too complete to symbolize anything but itself. Like all great ruins, it turns metaphor back into matter. The only meaning left is physical: the weight of concrete, the echo of waves, the slow exfoliation of time.

In 2015, UNESCO declared Hashima part of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Heritage. The designation was meant to honor its role in modernization, but the island remains uneasy with commemoration. Its history includes forced labor, wartime exploitation, human suffering that no plaque can neutralize. The concrete holds those memories more honestly than any inscription. They linger in the air, invisible, unphotographable, part of the island’s atmosphere.

Mitsubishi’s farewell sermon: the faith withdrawn, the congregation dismissed, the concrete left to pray alone.

Late in the afternoon, the ferry departs. The sea swallows distance quickly; within minutes, Hashima has shrunk back into outline. From afar it looks whole again, almost solid, like a ship restored to motion. But the illusion doesn’t last. As the coastline of Nagasaki grows nearer, the island dissolves into haze, its edges softening until it becomes indistinguishable from the sea itself.

Industrial modernism wanted to build eternity out of concrete. Hashima shows what eternity actually looks like: erosion, stillness, and the faint sound of waves echoing through empty corridors. Its beauty lies in its completeness, in the way it renders the dream of progress not as triumph or catastrophe but as equilibrium. Nothing more can happen here, and perhaps that is what makes it so haunting.

The ferry’s engine hums. Tourists scroll through the images they’ve captured: perfect compositions of ruin and horizon. In each photograph, the island appears frozen, indifferent, monumental. Yet if one were to listen closely, one might hear a faint rhythm beneath the engine, the whisper of water against concrete, steady, mechanical, eternal.

The sound of a machine that has forgotten its purpose, still running.

Michi Shima (b. 1979 in Vancouver) studied comparative geography and urban literature at McGill University and the Bartlett School of Architecture, an academic combination that almost guaranteed a lifelong interest in ruins. She writes about decay, the poetry of infrastructure, and the afterlives of ideas that persist mainly out of habit. Her first book, “Concrete Elegies” (Blue Lantern Press, 2012), is out of print and occasionally mistaken for a work of fiction.

Cover image: From above, Hashima resembles a failed utopia that learned to float. The future was compact enough to fit inside a seawall.