A town of 7,500 people packed up and left. The buildings stayed. So did about a hundred residents, and an enormous number of cats.
The ferry from Seto takes half an hour and carries roughly nine people, four of whom are carrying groceries.
You step off onto an island with a shopping street, a school, apartment blocks eight storeys high — and almost nobody in them. A washing line is out on a fourth-floor balcony. Three floors above it, a window has been open since 2001.
A cat watches you from the top of a rusted conveyor. It has clearly done this before and is unimpressed.
Everyone has seen Gunkanjima — Battleship Island — the concrete ruin that appeared in a Bond film. You can visit it, in the sense that a boat takes you to a fenced walkway for 45 minutes while a guide talks and 90 people photograph the same wall.
Ikeshima is the other one, and almost nobody goes. It was a coal island that ran until 2001, home to about 7,500 people at its peak, with everything a town needs stacked onto a rock 7 km offshore. When the mine closed, the town emptied over a few years. Around 100 people stayed.
That is what makes it different from every other ruin you have visited. This is not a ruin park. It is a town that mostly left, with the lights still on in a few windows, a small shop still open, and a bus that still runs to a timetable for the people who need it.
The mine tours are run by former miners. You go underground, you sit in the machinery, and a man who spent twenty years down there explains what everything did. It is exactly as good as that sounds, and it is the reason to build the day around this island rather than just photographing it.
Above ground you can walk the streets freely: the shopping arcade, the school, the eight-storey blocks with trees growing out of them. Cats have annexed large sections and have opinions about your route.
Ruin tourism usually asks you to imagine the people who left. Ikeshima does something much stranger: some of them are still here, buying milk in the shop under the empty apartment block. You are not looking at the past. You are looking at the exact moment a place stops being a town, stretched out over twenty-five years, still in progress, with residents.
- The island's population peaked around 7,500 in the 1970s. It is now roughly 100 and still falling.
- Japan's last operating coal mines closed in the 2000s; Ikeshima's shut in 2001 and the underground tour uses the real equipment, not a reconstruction.
- Nagasaki has a whole cluster of these island stories, from Gunkanjima to the hidden Christian settlements — this coast has been quietly extraordinary for four hundred years.
Getting there
Ferry from Seto Port (瀬戸港) in Saikai City — about 30 minutes. Seto is roughly 1.5 hours from Nagasaki city by car or bus. Day trips work, but the last ferry is genuinely the last ferry, and the island has almost no accommodation. Mine tours must be booked in advance through the Ikeshima tour operator.