Escape To - part one - The Island Hashima

There’s an island-

-small -maybe 500 meters long- located about five kilometres off the Japanese coast- fortified with grey walls and grey towers, and completely empty of people. It sits out there, a brooding fortress,  a stealthy battleship, its silhouette hovering black on the horizon, a wraith and a ruin, menacing the city of Nagasaki.

It was once the heart of a brief and frantic industry, a small city constructed out there on the sea-beaten rock, but when the industry left, its people vanished and the island, its buildings, its memories was given up to the sea. Used-up, barren and abandoned it slowly crumbles away, concrete cracks, wood rots- eroded by the endless blasting sea-wind with it salted touch, and the dark waters wait to devour all.


 ...landing.

Vast and empty it is, a silent place and a lonely place, cataclysmic in its ruin, but tranquil in its stillness. The sea-wind threads endless tendrils through the narrow streets, the walls parched and bare, taking up the disturbed dust and ashes and winging it out to sea in gentle erosion. Timbers creak and crack, stones skip and tumble, and on all sides, the low rumble of the titanic grey sea pressing upon the walls.
All around the frail towers cluster together -life-leeched and skeletal- their skin blasted away and their innards spewed out to form grisly mounds of splinter and shrapnel at their shrunken feet. Iron-grey, rust-red and charred black paints a desolate canvas with here and there splashes of green shooting upward,  strangled and subdued. Empty-eyed, and gaping-mouthed are the silent towers, horror-struck and appalled, withered and feeble.


But they stand still.

A journey alone through the ruin -shaking steps on sliding footing- clambering and clamourous, an island to discover, a history to witness, a place lost and forgotten, unoccupied and unclaimed...

The stillness is unwilling to break, the silence returns wholly and immediately at any pause, the fervent unyielding quiet restored, as reverential as a graveyard, a weight pressing upon the spirit.

But more than this, more than the blasted landscape, the unconquerable quiet, is the slow awareness of the time that is trapped here. A bustling metropolis was here once, people living out complex and interconnected lives, families, friends, a concentration of activity, toil and struggle, love and hope- all vanished, all dispersed. Only the ghosts remain; crumbling homes with rotted furnishing, the abandoned classrooms with mouldering books, and everywhere, overturned chairs, open drawers... dropped toys.

In the silence, the numbing vastness of the life that was once here is seen, both at immediately present, and infinitely distance. Time itself is made manifest here in this vision of the past, the passing of the ages revealed in the depth of dust and decay and the frailty of wood and concrete, the remnants of a time lost since past, and unable to fade.

But peace can be found here. The anxiety that is felt is from a fear of the very large. Of scale. A fear of vast buildings reaching up to the sky, of the great black sea outside, the enormous wet sky overhead and of course, of time.

One just needs to find shelter from this scale; to carve out a little piece of space to own, to control, and thereby reinstating control. If that could be achieved, this place would become a sanctuary, a refuge, and a retreat from the broad and bustling cities over on the coast, a place to come -swiftly and discreetly- to rest, centre oneself, and to contemplate, while the world outside continues to spiral.

This cannot be a transformation of the island. The island is too great to be changed easily, and if this was achieved, it would just become an extension of the city, and outpost, a resort, and suddenly, disappointingly accessible, locatable and enterable- a destination for all but a refuge for none. As it exists now, it is a borderland, residing outside the living world, but not yet incorporeal, this realm is not desirable for the many, it could not comfort the many, but it could house a few, or a single person. If that person embraced the silence; saw vacancy as peace, and desolation as cloak to the world.

One need only a shelter from the elements and from scale. To keep the rain off, the sun in check, as well as keeping out the infinity, the anonymity and vacuousness.


There is just a need for shelter....

A small place, a human place, with doors to close, but not to be trapped, with windows to look out from, but not to be watched. A canopy from the towering heights and a wall to the silent expanse. Not just space, but place; intimate, personal, a place all your own, that is within your own control and design where you might create identity within anonymity, a place in placelessness, a shelter in the desolation. It is a manifestation of self, of spirit made physical which can only exist in realm such as this that already exists partly outside the mundane world, that known and familiar place. 

Locate it anywhere, the quality of place within the void could be orchestrated in any location, it needs only the definition of space within the desolation;  an island within an island. The value in this site is its very inhospitality, which demands the creation of place and which will continually counterpoint it, making the occupant dependent to the shelter, intimate with the shelter, as you would a life-raft after days at sea or a mountain cabin after being lost in the snow.
This is a retreat, a refuge from the world that can only exist here. Here in this realm a person can reaffirm self, desire and purpose. It is a break from the world, a private resort, on an abandoned island, avoided like a graveyard, ringed by walls, surrounded by the sea.


This is sanctuary...


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Photo credit (without additions); Jordy Meow, a French-born photographer, adventurer and urban explorer living in Japan who has published his extensive experience within Gunkanjima amongst other projects on his website, which has been the source of the excellent, moody and emotional photography that has helped tell this story within the project.

Found here;
http://www.haikyo.org
http://www.totorotimes.com

Neglect

The struggle becomes too great. The constant toiling strain to keep above the rising, rushing tide of a life’s cares, concerns and petty things. Gasping jaws, flailing arms -rocked and buffeted- dragged under- clamouring above- keeping at bay the sucking, pulling darkness all around, fighting for the brilliant light and sweet breath. But ever present is that cold; the creeping fatigue, the suffocating hopelessness, the drain of mind and will and the slow erosion of self.

Companions fail, each according to their own private undoing and the union of mind is undone. Your teacher, Reason- noble and erect in the sunlight, stutters and trembles in the dark. Your lover, Passion- bold and impetuous in the charge, soon tires and recants his extravagant vows. Your mistress Truth, haughty and beautiful in form, is impossible to appease and is hated and abused.

But it is not a malign and cunning thing that conquers, not cold rationale, or bitter realisation, it is just the worm. The decay, the rot, the slow cancer of the mind; without face or presentation, a power blind and dumb and without motive or strategy, but ancient, dreadfully powerful, and eternal. The worm conquerors, he is the master of death; and the silence, the peace, the unknowing of final death is present in life; it is lethargy, hopelessness and despair, and they foreshadow that death. The worm conquers; but brief, uncertain life can be won -beaten, strangled and eventually recalled- this small happy thing can exist for time, so long as a will is there to safeguard it.