A few kilometers from the port of Nagasaki, in Japan, is the island of Hashima, a piece of land in the shape of a battleship that is also known as Gunkanjima.
The area, which was once a prosperous mining community, today it is completely uninhabited.
Due to this, the ruins of the buildings in which the ancient inhabitants of Hashima lived and worked, give the island an air of lugubrious and greyish that has caused even the Japanese to define it as a ghost place.
It should be noted that it was in 1810 when it was discovered for the first time that there was coal on the island. Due to this, in 1870 a mine of carbon. It is from 1890, with the acquisition of the business by Mitshubishi, when the area began to to flourish as a thriving community.
The mine was open until January 15, 1974. On April 20 of that year, the last inhabitants left Gunkanjima, leaving a place where only the climate and other natural elements have modified the physiognomy of the island.
Surrounded by huge reinforced concrete blocks to defend against the waves (the same ones that give it that battleship shape), Hashima came to house up to about 5,300 inhabitants at the end of the 1950s.
At that time the island had hospitals, schools, dozens of shops and even a Pachinko (slot machine) room where the miners relaxed after arduous shifts underground.
Toru Sakai and Makiko were some of the photographers who had the opportunity to enter the forbidden areas of the island.
His images glimpse a world in silence, without movement, in which time seems to have stopped forever.
This almost inert island, a legacy of the industrial revolution in Japan that took place during the Meiji era, has served as inspiration for recent films such as Skyfall (2012) or the film version of Shingeki no Kyojin (Attack on Titan, 2015).
The island, declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2015, receives dozens of tourists every day who travel in some of the boats of the four companies that have authorization to enter the area.
The visit is limited to one hour and during it, access is only allowed to three observation areas away from the former homes of the miners and their families.