An Energy Chronology
The history of Hashima Island reads like a chronology of changes in Japan's energy policies from the Meiji Period to modern times. For centuries the people living on Takashima, a large island near Hashima, are said to have collected coal from exposed beds and used it as a household fuel. They called it goheita after the man by the same name who, according to local legend, stumbled on coal's combustible properties by inadvertently lighting a bonfire on the black rock.
When transportation networks improved in the 18th and 19th centuries, the people of Takashima began to sell their coal abroad, primarily to salt-makers on the coast of the Seto Inland Sea. One of Japan's most important industries at the time, salt-making, had relied traditionally on resin-rich pinewood as a fuel to boil seawater, but it was suffering from the ongoing depletion of pine forests. Coal was deemed the ideal alternative to pinewood.
At the time, Takashima Island was part of a feudal domain administered by the Fukahori Family, a branch of the Nabeshima Clan of present-day Saga Prefecture. Seeing the profits gleaned from the coal trade, the Fukahori Family usurped the management rights, assigned the islanders the role of subcontractor and labor force, and established coal profits as one of the pillars of the local economy.
This system was still firmly in place when Japan opened its doors to the world in the late 1850s and Nagasaki gained new importance as the closest port to China and a stopover for foreign commercial ships and naval vessels. This was also a time when Britain, America, and other Western countries were replacing their sail-rigged tea clippers and warships with steam-driven ships. The resulting demand for coal prompted Nabeshima Naomasa, lord of the Nabeshima Clan, to expand production capacity of the mine on Takashima.
Nabeshima turned to Scottish merchant Thomas B. Glover (1838-1911) for help. Until then, the coal- mining method on Takashima had been primitive: miners simply chipped away at exposed surfaces with picks and then moved on to other sites when the coal ran out or the holes became too deep to dig safely. But Glover imported modern mining equipment from Britain and hired British mining engineers to drill a vertical-shaft mine on the island. In April 1869, the drillers struck a coal bed some 45 meters underground, and Japan's first modern coal mine started production.
The enormous success of the Takashima coal mine filled Nagasaki coffers with foreign currency and sparked a rush to develop mines on nearby islands—including the until-then useless heap of rock called Hashima.
Hashima Coal Mine Is Born
While assuming exclusive rights to work the Takashima mine, the Nabeshima Clan allowed the Fukahori Family to tap the veins of coal streaking across other nearby islands. After several failed attempts, the family finally installed a shaft mine on Hashima in 1887, inhabiting it for the first time. Three years later, though, it sold the island to Mitsubishi Corporation 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.
The years that followed witnessed a remarkable surge in Japan's industrial capacity and military might, encouraged by victory in both the Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) and Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905). At Hashima, Mitsubishi launched a project to tap the coal resources under the sea bottom, successfully sinking a 199-meter-long vertical shaft in 1895 and still another shaft in 1898. The company also utilized the slag from the mine to carry out a series of land reclamations, thereby creating flat space for industrial facilities and dormitories. Completed around 1907, the high sea-walls gave the island the appearance of a battleship riding the waves. The resemblance was so uncanny that a local newspaper reporter dubbed it Gunkanjima (Battleship Island), a nickname that soon replaced the official name in common parlance.
Hashima was producing about 150,000 tons of coal annually and its population had soared to over 3,000 when, in 1916, Mitsubishi built a reinforced concrete apartment block on the island to alleviate the lack of housing space and to prevent typhoon damage. This was Japan's first concrete building of any significant size. America's first large-scale concrete structure—the Ingalls Office Building, in Cincinnati—had been built only 14 years earlier.
A square, six-story structure built around a dingy inner courtyard at the southern edge of the island, the building provided cramped but private lodgings for the miners and their families. Each apartment consisted simply of a single, six-tatami-mat room (9.9 square meters) with a window, door, and small vestibule—more like a monk's cell than an apartment, but still a major improvement over previous living quarters. Bathing, cooking, and toilet facilities were communal.
This building was followed two years later by an even larger apartment complex on the sloping rock at the center of the island. Then the tallest building in Japan, the E-shaped apartment block had nine stories on the ocean side and three on the rock side.
One multi-story apartment block followed another until the tiny island bristled with more than 30 concrete buildings. Even during the 11-year period before and during World War II, when not a single concrete building went up anywhere else in Japan, the construction of apartment blocks continued on Hashima as part of national efforts to meet the tremendous wartime demand for coal.
As a result of these efforts, Hashima's annual coal production reached a peak of 410,000 tons in 1941. But it was an achievement that exacted a heavy toll in human suffering. While Japanese youth disappeared onto the battlefields of China, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific, the Japanese government forcibly recruited large numbers of Koreans and Chinese to fill the empty places in its factories and mines, and many of these men perished as a result of the harsh conditions and a starvation diet.
Hashima was no exception. By the time the atomic bomb rattled the windows on Hashima apartment blocks and Japan surrendered to the Allied forces in August 1945, 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.
Suh Jung-woo, one of the Korean laborers fortunate enough to survive the ordeal, remembered Hashima in a 1983 interview:
I was one of two boys forced onto a truck in my village and taken to the government office, where several thousand other Koreans ranging in age from about fourteen to twenty had been gathered. After a night at an inn, we were taken by truck to a nearby city, then by train to the port at Pusan and ship from Pusan to Shimonoseki. About 300 members of the group, including myself, were then taken by train to Nagasaki, where we arrived the following morning. All of us were being sent to Hashima.
I had relatives in Japan, not only my parents in Nagoya but also family members living in Sasebo. I thought that no matter where I was sent in Japan I would be able to escape and find shelter with them. But as soon as I saw Hashima I lost all hope.
The island was surrounded by high concrete walls, and there was ocean, nothing but ocean, all around. It was crowded with concrete buildings as high as nine stories.... We Koreans were lodged in buildings on the edge of the island. Seven or eight of us were put together in a tiny room, giving each person no more than a few feet of space.
The buildings were made of reinforced concrete and had mortar on the outside, but the interior was filthy and falling apart.... We were given uniforms like rice bags to wear and forced to begin work the morning after arrival. We were constantly watched and ordered around by Japanese guards, some of whom were wearing swords.
The mine was deep under the sea, the workers reaching it by elevator down a long narrow shaft. The coal was carried out from a spacious underground chamber, but the digging places were so small that we had to crouch down to work. It was excruciating, exhausting labor. Gas collected in the tunnels, and the rock ceilings and walls threatened to collapse at any minute. I was convinced that I would never leave the island alive.
Four or five workers in fact died every month in accidents. Modern concepts of safety were nonexistent. The corpses were cremated on Nakanoshima, the little island beside Hashima.
An Energy Chronology
The history of Hashima Island reads like a chronology of changes in Japan's energy policies from the Meiji Period to modern times. For centuries the people living on Takashima, a large island near Hashima, are said to have collected coal from exposed beds and used it as a household fuel. They called it goheita after the man by the same name who, according to local legend, stumbled on coal's combustible properties by inadvertently lighting a bonfire on the black rock.
When transportation networks improved in the 18th and 19th centuries, the people of Takashima began to sell their coal abroad, primarily to salt-makers on the coast of the Seto Inland Sea. One of Japan's most important industries at the time, salt-making, had relied traditionally on resin-rich pinewood as a fuel to boil seawater, but it was suffering from the ongoing depletion of pine forests. Coal was deemed the ideal alternative to pinewood.
At the time, Takashima Island was part of a feudal domain administered by the Fukahori Family, a branch of the Nabeshima Clan of present-day Saga Prefecture. Seeing the profits gleaned from the coal trade, the Fukahori Family usurped the management rights, assigned the islanders the role of subcontractor and labor force, and established coal profits as one of the pillars of the local economy.
This system was still firmly in place when Japan opened its doors to the world in the late 1850s and Nagasaki gained new importance as the closest port to China and a stopover for foreign commercial ships and naval vessels. This was also a time when Britain, America, and other Western countries were replacing their sail-rigged tea clippers and warships with steam-driven ships. The resulting demand for coal prompted Nabeshima Naomasa, lord of the Nabeshima Clan, to expand production capacity of the mine on Takashima.
Nabeshima turned to Scottish merchant Thomas B. Glover (1838-1911) for help. Until then, the coal- mining method on Takashima had been primitive: miners simply chipped away at exposed surfaces with picks and then moved on to other sites when the coal ran out or the holes became too deep to dig safely. But Glover imported modern mining equipment from Britain and hired British mining engineers to drill a vertical-shaft mine on the island. In April 1869, the drillers struck a coal bed some 45 meters underground, and Japan's first modern coal mine started production.
The enormous success of the Takashima coal mine filled Nagasaki coffers with foreign currency and sparked a rush to develop mines on nearby islands—including the until-then useless heap of rock called Hashima.
Hashima Coal Mine Is Born
While assuming exclusive rights to work the Takashima mine, the Nabeshima Clan allowed the Fukahori Family to tap the veins of coal streaking across other nearby islands. After several failed attempts, the family finally installed a shaft mine on Hashima in 1887, inhabiting it for the first time. Three years later, though, it sold the island to Mitsubishi Corporation 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.
The years that followed witnessed a remarkable surge in Japan's industrial capacity and military might, encouraged by victory in both the Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) and Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905). At Hashima, Mitsubishi launched a project to tap the coal resources under the sea bottom, successfully sinking a 199-meter-long vertical shaft in 1895 and still another shaft in 1898. The company also utilized the slag from the mine to carry out a series of land reclamations, thereby creating flat space for industrial facilities and dormitories. Completed around 1907, the high sea-walls gave the island the appearance of a battleship riding the waves. The resemblance was so uncanny that a local newspaper reporter dubbed it Gunkanjima (Battleship Island), a nickname that soon replaced the official name in common parlance.
Hashima was producing about 150,000 tons of coal annually and its population had soared to over 3,000 when, in 1916, Mitsubishi built a reinforced concrete apartment block on the island to alleviate the lack of housing space and to prevent typhoon damage. This was Japan's first concrete building of any significant size. America's first large-scale concrete structure—the Ingalls Office Building, in Cincinnati—had been built only 14 years earlier.
A square, six-story structure built around a dingy inner courtyard at the southern edge of the island, the building provided cramped but private lodgings for the miners and their families. Each apartment consisted simply of a single, six-tatami-mat room (9.9 square meters) with a window, door, and small vestibule—more like a monk's cell than an apartment, but still a major improvement over previous living quarters. Bathing, cooking, and toilet facilities were communal.
This building was followed two years later by an even larger apartment complex on the sloping rock at the center of the island. Then the tallest building in Japan, the E-shaped apartment block had nine stories on the ocean side and three on the rock side.
One multi-story apartment block followed another until the tiny island bristled with more than 30 concrete buildings. Even during the 11-year period before and during World War II, when not a single concrete building went up anywhere else in Japan, the construction of apartment blocks continued on Hashima as part of national efforts to meet the tremendous wartime demand for coal.
As a result of these efforts, Hashima's annual coal production reached a peak of 410,000 tons in 1941. But it was an achievement that exacted a heavy toll in human suffering. While Japanese youth disappeared onto the battlefields of China, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific, the Japanese government forcibly recruited large numbers of Koreans and Chinese to fill the empty places in its factories and mines, and many of these men perished as a result of the harsh conditions and a starvation diet.
Hashima was no exception. By the time the atomic bomb rattled the windows on Hashima apartment blocks and Japan surrendered to the Allied forces in August 1945, 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.
Suh Jung-woo, one of the Korean laborers fortunate enough to survive the ordeal, remembered Hashima in a 1983 interview:
I was one of two boys forced onto a truck in my village and taken to the government office, where several thousand other Koreans ranging in age from about fourteen to twenty had been gathered. After a night at an inn, we were taken by truck to a nearby city, then by train to the port at Pusan and ship from Pusan to Shimonoseki. About 300 members of the group, including myself, were then taken by train to Nagasaki, where we arrived the following morning. All of us were being sent to Hashima.
I had relatives in Japan, not only my parents in Nagoya but also family members living in Sasebo. I thought that no matter where I was sent in Japan I would be able to escape and find shelter with them. But as soon as I saw Hashima I lost all hope.
The island was surrounded by high concrete walls, and there was ocean, nothing but ocean, all around. It was crowded with concrete buildings as high as nine stories.... We Koreans were lodged in buildings on the edge of the island. Seven or eight of us were put together in a tiny room, giving each person no more than a few feet of space.
The buildings were made of reinforced concrete and had mortar on the outside, but the interior was filthy and falling apart.... We were given uniforms like rice bags to wear and forced to begin work the morning after arrival. We were constantly watched and ordered around by Japanese guards, some of whom were wearing swords.
The mine was deep under the sea, the workers reaching it by elevator down a long narrow shaft. The coal was carried out from a spacious underground chamber, but the digging places were so small that we had to crouch down to work. It was excruciating, exhausting labor. Gas collected in the tunnels, and the rock ceilings and walls threatened to collapse at any minute. I was convinced that I would never leave the island alive.
Four or five workers in fact died every month in accidents. Modern concepts of safety were nonexistent. The corpses were cremated on Nakanoshima, the little island beside Hashima.
การแปล กรุณารอสักครู่..