Our Vision

Hashima XR is a collaboration between historians, architects, and game designers using immersive virtual reality technology to preserve the history and cultural heritage of Hashima Island. Hashima was a unique coal mining town approximately 15 kilometers from Nagasaki, Japan. It was abandoned in 1974 when the Japanese economy shifted from coal to oil. Today it is an industrial ruin.

We are reconstructing an authentic first-person immersive virtual reality experience (IVE) of daily life for residents of the coal mining community on Hashima Island, also known as Battleship Island. We use the 3d game engine technology of the Unreal Engine to transfer complex architectural heritage BIM data, historical records, oral history sources, and 3d scans of material artifacts into an immersive experience. We aim to preserve the tangible and intangible heritage of Hashima alongside the historical complexity of daily life within the small coal mining community.

The HashimaXR IVE is a first-person interactive exploration of a small coal mining community as it existed in 1970. It consists of modules that depict interchangeable narrative loops for players to accomplish. The modules explore the themes of "work," "daily life," "environment," and "technology" to expose participants to an immersive experience of everyday life within an ultra-compact urban living experience and an economy centered on coal mining. This project is a distinctive way to grow upon existing methods of protecting and preserving tangible and intangible heritage.

A major colliery from the 1880s to the 1970s, Hashima was widely known as “Battleship Island” because of the silhouette of its concrete seawalls, seven-story housing complex, and nine-story apartment building that resembled the Tosa-class battleships built by the Mitsubishi Shipyards in Nagasaki. IVR technology enables visitors to experience the complex history of an industrial heritage site closely linked to Japan’s rise as a modern industrial power.

Hashima Island, with an area of 6.3 hectares (16 acres), was a marvel of civil engineering technology and the site of Japan’s first undersea coal mine. Small-scale mining operations began in 1871, organized by local ex-samurai. However, the harsh natural environment and limited capital resources made the operation untenable. In 1890, all rights to the mines were transferred to Mitsubishi, and the company rapidly scaled up the operation, doubling the size of the island by leveling elevated areas and using excavated mine waste as landfill to extend the shoreline and seawall. A major typhoon in 1905 destroyed the seawall and leveled half of all residential buildings. The company responded to the disaster by transitioning to reinforced concrete structures, the first of which was completed in 1916.

By the mid-1950s, the island was home to more than five thousand men, women, and children, making it the world's most densely populated community. Mine workers, office staff, managers, and their multi-generational families lived within inclined residential spaces that constituted about 60 percent of the island. The surface facilities of the colliery, situated on the flat southwestern part of the island, occupied the remaining 40 percent. The undersea mine – the focus of the enterprise – extended more than a kilometer underground and several square kilometers under the seabed.

The people who worked and managed the colliery formed a self-contained community in an extraordinarily concentrated multi-level complex. The island living environment included primary and secondary schools, a movie theatre, a public swimming pool, three public baths, mom-and-pop restaurants, an open-air market, a Buddhist Temple, and a Shinto Shrine at its religious and festive center. The whole of the island was an integrated space where no part could function on its own.