Hashima

Hashima — Photographs of Gunkanjima by Taiji Matsue

Hashima is a Photobooks title documenting the abandoned island of Hashima, commonly known as Gunkanjima, off the coast of Nagasaki. The photographs were made by Taiji Matsue in 1983, when the island had been closed for nearly a decade following the end of coal extraction. The 2017 edition presents these images digitally remastered from the original negatives.

Hashima was developed from the late nineteenth century as a coal-mining facility, its land area expanded artificially and its surface covered in dense concrete residential and industrial structures. At its peak it housed thousands of workers and their families on a landmass of less than seven hectares. Operations ceased in 1974, and the island was closed to the public. When Matsue visited in 1983, the built fabric remained largely intact — corridors, stairwells, façades, and interiors held in a state of structural completeness without occupation.

Matsue's approach to the site is systematic rather than expressive. The photographs attend to surfaces — concrete panels, window grids, corridor sequences, the geometry of repeated structural elements — without framing the island as a ruin in any romantic sense. The work is observational and measured. Absence registers not as loss but as a condition of the space, recorded with the same analytical attention Matsue applies across his broader practice.

The digital remastering from original negatives for this Getsuyosha edition recovers tonal detail and structural clarity from four-decade-old source material. The result is a photographic record that holds its documentary precision without the degradation that reproduction from secondary sources would introduce.