I really love abandoned places. Not just the variety of websites dedicated to documenting them, either.
When I was a kid I went on a field trip to somewhere in the Republic of Ireland. We encountered a country house, gardens, stable block and outbuildings which were all still standing, all utterly deserted. Things hanging from ceilings and swinging in the breeze. The wind passing straight through a drawing–room. Dead birds on the stairs. Scratchings from the end of dark corridors.
And then you go outside and there’s real outdoor wind, sunlight on your skin. The building you just left is there, solid and real enough, touchable, but still very, very unreal: its essential quality is one of evanescence.
Off the westernmost coast of Japan, is an island called “Gunkanjima” that is hardly known even to the Japanese. Long ago, the island was nothing more than a small reef. Then in 1810, the chance discovery of coal drastically changed the fate of this reef.
I was twenty-two when I first visited the island I had dreamed about ever since childhood. Much like a fortress built upon the sea, surrounded by high walls,the island possessed an air of a small kingdom, where its denizens boasted “There is nothing we don't have here.”
Eventually, the mines faced an end, and in 1974 the world’s once most densely populated island become totally deserted.
The link from the island's name takes you to a predictably unsettling gallery of this island — which is packed to the very clifflines with everything a small city would need. It’s all standing, and all empty. Amazing stuff.
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