"12 years ago (at the time of writing), in 1974, the Gunkanjima submarine coal mine was shut down. Most of the former inhabitants, who dispersed to various parts of Japan (especially the Kansai region) to find work, ended up living in Housing corporation apartment blocks, private apartment blocks, Company houses and so on. According to the results of a questionnaire which we sent out and reports from the former inhabitants of Gunkanjima, contrary to our expectations the general consensus was that the apartment houses of Gunkanjima provided an environment where they could live more comfortably than those they live in at present. The population density of Gunkanjima was approximately 1,400 people per hectare, which was much higher than that of any other place. Moreover Gunkanjima is an island set in the open sea, and the apartment houses there were exposed to much more severe conditions that the average urban apartment house, including, for example, typhoons, tidal waves, lack of water, and poor natural lighting on account of the closely packed high rise buildings. The people living on Gunkanjima belonged to the lower strata of Japanese society, at a time of upheaval and transition in the wake of the Meiji Restoration, when tremendous efforts were being made to transform a backwards society forcibly into a modern industrial and military power. Given the harsh conditions which inevitably resulted, the former inhabitants' apparent preference for their life on Gunkanjima would seem to defy rational explanation.

Of course, the working conditions and social environment had improved since the age of the terraced row-houses or 'Takobeya' before the war. Things were better, too, than they had been during the war itself when most of the miners were foreigners (Chinese prisoners of war and Korean conscript laborers). Living conditions in the mine's most productive years (when the population was also at its highest) before and after the war, when coal was known as the black diamond are scarcely comparable with the dark days of the war. In the postwar years, the labor union was strengthened, and labor conditions, living facilities, and the management were greatly improved. In contrast to the smaller mines, of which there were many in Chikuho, the Gunkanjima mine was run by Mitsubishi, one of the biggest enterprises in Japan, and the wages were high. (The proportion of residents who owned the basic electrical products known as the “3 divine elements”, and a television set in the early years was well above the national average, one reason for which was perhaps that they had little else to spend their money on in such a remote spot). Apart from the high density and lack of space, in many ways, during the grim years after the war when food was short all over Japan, Gunkanjima was an easier place to live than the mainland.

Seeing the living environment on Gunkanjima as an outsider, it nevertheless remains difficult to believe that it was an “easy place to live”, and certain special factors should be borne in mind when assessing the attitude of former residents. Former one thing, we should remember that a sense of homesickness often makes it easy to forget unpleasant experiences. Another important point is that former residents often adapted badly to the environment of an apartment house in t a city where the way of living is totally different. However although there were few miners who had lived on Gunkanjima for generations and knew little of the outside world, many of them had lived in an instable life. Especially after the War, a lot of Japanese repatriated from Manchuria came to live on Gunkanjima, and in this way people who were formerly relatively prosperous came to comprise a high proportion of the inhabitants of the island . In this sense, although they constituted a local community, their attitudes and way of life differed from those of farmers and fisherman who tend to belong to a traditional indigenous culture. Despite the distinction between workers who received a monthly salary and those who were paid on a daily basis, the tenor of the whole society was closer to that of salary men in mainland cities.

It is impossible to discuss the character of a community without considering the relationships between individuals and the attitude to life arising from its financial and social background. It is equally impossible to discuss aspects of human life such as privacy or alienation without examining the influence of the physical environment or the nature of the living space. Though Gunkanjima has its own unique and peculiar characteristics, there exists a reciprocal relationship between the nature of living space and the way of life and the character of a community, and that relationship is not peculiar to individual examples but transcends them and has universal validity. In this chapter we are primarily interested in clarifying the ways in which architectural design and spatial composition can influence the quality of life in a high density environment. We have decided to limit the present study to a discussion of the elements relating specifically to the planning and composition of living space, because that is the subject which our professional training best equips us to evaluate. Using only the data which we collected during the course of our research, we shall indicate problems, put them in order, and discuss them.

The buildings on Gunkanjima were almost all built in the Taisho and early Showa periods before the War. There are many unclear points about the nature of the community on the island at the time, and it was very different from ordinary modern urban societies. For this reason we have chosen not to consider the period, but to focus on the community on the island during the prosperous years from the mid 1950's until the closure of the mine in 1974.

As noted above, the contents of this chapter are insufficient to provide a comprehensive picture of the community on Gunkanjima, and we have confined ourselves largely to a consideration of problems related to the architecture. However we feel that our research provides a key to an understanding of the former residents' statement that the unparalleled high density of Gunkanjima was a “better place to live” than a modern Housing Corporation apartment block."