Gunkanjima is a Japanese island that was dedicated to underwater coal mining. It was densely-populated, built right up onto the cliffs of the shore with high fortress-type walls around it. It was abandoned in some sort of a hurry in 1974, becoming an eerie deserted ghost town in the time-honored Marie Celeste fashion.
Now it has its own website, advertising its own DVD and the fact that it's about to become a tourist attraction. Some sort of post-industrial theme park, with minehead equipment and fallen early-seventies glamour calendars substituting for the traditional Disneyland of pepper's ghost-filled dwarf-caverns bearing tilted gilt-frame 10x8s of Goofy on the walls.
Unfortunately, the excerpts from the DVD make the word 'glacial' sound over-hasty, but if you have a fast intertubes connections and fifteen minutes to spare without feeling like you're going to start twitching, this is a very pretty site. The Japanese word for "concrete" is "concureeto" and that seems to be about all you need to know to listen to the narrator.
The videos are here, the still photographs are here. If you have another non-twitchy couple of minutes to go through the flash intro, here it is.
Found via a project managers' blog, Project (http://zo-d.com/blog/archives/architecture/ruins-as-tourist-attraction.html) of all places.
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