Realized Episode
Unlike Episodes 01–03 which document storyboard specifications for unreleased XR content, this episode presents functional audio experiences that can be engaged directly. The folk songs from the 1961 Folkways album represent the source cultures from which Hashima's community was assembled — traditions that workers carried in memory when they arrived on the island.
What the Miners Brought
Episode Overview
When miners and their families arrived on Hashima Island from the mid-1950s onward, they came for the higher wages Mitsubishi paid for working in such an isolated, dangerous place. They came from Fukuoka and Fukushima, from Kagoshima and Tottori, from coalfields that were declining and villages that were emptying.
They also came with something that couldn't be controlled: the songs, dialects, and cultural traditions of their home regions.
This episode contains playable audio from the 1961 Folkways album Traditional Folk Songs of Japan. For the best experience, use headphones.
The Recording Moment: 1961
In 1961, Japanese ethnomusicologist Ryutaro Hattori compiled Traditional Folk Songs of Japan for Smithsonian Folkways. The album was an act of salvage ethnography — an attempt to document regional traditions that were disappearing as Japan industrialised and urbanised.
5,259 people on 6.3 hectares — the highest population density anywhere on Earth.
Hattori's compilation captures regional folk traditions at the very moment Hashima was most populated.
Japan announces the transition from coal to petroleum. The coalfields begin their terminal decline.
The mine closes in April. Within weeks, residents evacuate. The songs, if any remained, leave with them — undocumented.
Learning Outcomes
- Analyse folk songs as historical evidence of labour, migration, and community
- Understand how recording technology transforms oral traditions into commodified heritage
- Recognise intangible cultural heritage as a counter-archive to official records
- Interpret the absence of documentation as itself a form of historical evidence
- Practice listening as a methodology for historical inquiry
Japan's Coalfield Geography
Migration Patterns
The four songs in this episode represent regions from across Japan — places from which Hashima's workers migrated. The dashed lines on the map trace the journeys these workers made, carrying regional traditions with them.
Hashima's population in the 1950s–60s was drawn from coalfield regions across Japan. Workers arrived with regional dialects, cultural traditions, and folk songs from home. The absence of documented folk songs from Hashima itself raises questions about what happens to tradition in artificial, company-controlled communities.
Source Regions
Jōban Coalfield (Fukushima/Ibaraki) — Japan's largest mine by 1944. Workers brought Tōhoku dialect and northeastern traditions.
Chikuhō Coalfield (Fukuoka) — Birthplace of Tankō Bushi. Likely formed Hashima's largest source population.
Kagoshima — Satsuma warrior culture transformed into festival dance. Workers brought distinctive dialect and shōchū culture.
Iwai (Tottori) — Historic hot spring town. The bathing song reflects the importance of communal bathing in working-class culture.
Coal Miner's Songs of Jōban
From Traditional Folk Songs of Japan (Folkways FW04534, 1961)
The Jōban Coalfield
Located in the Abukuma mountain foothills of Fukushima and Ibaraki prefectures, the Jōban coalfield was Japan's largest mine by 1944. At its peak in the 1950s, over 130 mines operated across the region, producing 4.3 million tons of coal annually.
The coalfield closed in 1976 — just two years after Hashima. The site later became the location of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
Migration to Hashima
Workers from Jōban brought Tōhoku dialect and northeastern cultural traditions to the island. As the Jōban coalfield declined through the 1960s, Hashima's higher wages would have drawn workers southward — a migration from one dying industry to another's final years.
The Coal Miner's Song in Kyushu
From Traditional Folk Songs of Japan (Folkways FW04534, 1961)
The Chikuhō Coalfield
Japan's largest coalfield before World War II, Chikuhō produced over 50% of national coal output. Spanning 787 square kilometres across Fukuoka Prefecture, the coalfield fueled the Yahata Steel Works and Japan's industrialisation.
Tagawa City, within the Chikuhō region, is the birthplace of Tankō Bushi — Japan's most famous coal mining song. The Yamamoto Sakubei Collection, a UNESCO Memory of the World, documents life in these mines through paintings and writings by a miner who began working at age seven.
Migration to Hashima
Chikuhō miners likely formed the largest single source population for Hashima. They brought Kyushu dialect, regional foodways, and direct experience of the Miike and Tagawa mining traditions.
When the 1960 Miike labour dispute convulsed the coal industry, Hashima — operated by Mitsubishi rather than Mitsui — may have seemed a safer option for workers seeking stability.
Kagoshima Ohara Bushi
From Traditional Folk Songs of Japan (Folkways FW04534, 1961)
The Ohara Bushi Tradition
Unlike the other songs here, Ohara Bushi originated not in the coalfields but in Satsuma warrior culture. Beginning as Yassa Bushi — a samurai battlefield song — it transformed over centuries into a labour song for soil-compacting work in construction.
Geisha popularised it in the Taishō Era (1912–26), and it became a nationwide Bon dance song. Most significantly, composer Nakayama Shinpei borrowed its melody for Tokyo Ondo in 1932 — linking Satsuma tradition to Tokyo's most famous festival song.
Migration to Hashima
Workers from Kagoshima brought Satsuma dialect — notably different from other Kyushu varieties — and sweet potato shōchū culture. Kagoshima has a long history of labour migration stretching back to the Meiji era.
On Hashima, Kagoshima workers would have encountered not only the Chikuhō miners but also the echoes of their own regional song in the Tokyo Ondo that played at festivals across Japan.
The Song of Bathing in the Hot Spring
The sentō: communal space where regional traditions might have converged
From Traditional Folk Songs of Japan (Folkways FW04534, 1961)
Iwai Onsen
Iwai is a historic hot spring town in Tottori Prefecture, on Japan's San'in coast. While not a coalfield, the song's inclusion reflects the importance of communal bathing in Japanese working-class culture — the sentō as a space of bodily recovery and social connection after gruelling labour.
The Bathhouse as Social Space
Hashima had communal bathhouses — essential infrastructure for a mining community. The daily rhythm of shift work followed by bathing was universal across Japan's industrial communities.
The sentō would have been one of the few spaces where workers from different regions — Kyushu, Tōhoku, San'in — encountered each other outside the hierarchies of the mine and the company housing blocks. Here, stripped of uniforms and rank, workers from Fukuoka might have heard Fukushima dialect for the first time. Songs might have been shared, compared, or simply overheard.
If any space on Hashima might have preserved or blended regional traditions, it was here.
From Coalfield to Gramophone
The 1932 Recording Moment
Before we can understand what the miners brought to Hashima, we must understand what had already happened to their songs.
In 1932, Victor Records Japan released the first commercial recording of Tankō Bushi (Victor V-41543). The singer was Suzuki Masao (1900–1961), a professional min'yō (folk song) performer from Miyagi Prefecture — not from the Kyushu coalfields where the song originated.
Commodification of Tradition
That same year, composer Nakayama Shinpei wrote Marunouchi Ondo for a business-sponsored Bon festival in Tokyo's Hibiya Park. The commission came from a tea shop owner who wanted to boost local commerce — a purely secular affair designed to promote business, not honour the dead.
Nakayama borrowed the melody from Kagoshima Ohara Bushi. The following year, with revised lyrics, it became Tokyo Ondo — an explosive nationwide hit.
What Recording Changed
Standardisation: Regional variants flattened into single "definitive" versions
Professionalisation: Songs performed by trained studio artists, not coalfield workers
Commodification: Tradition packaged for urban consumers nostalgic for a rural past
Dissemination: Gramophones and radio carrying these versions across Japan
The Erased Place Name
Modern arrangements of Tankō Bushi replace the original lyric "Miike Tankō" (Miike Coal Mine) with "uchi no oyama" — a generic term meaning "our coal mine." The specific place name was erased; the song became universally applicable, divorced from the actual workers who first sang it.
Listening as Historical Practice
Sound as Evidence
The songs in this episode are not simply entertainment. They are evidence — a form of historical documentation that official records rarely capture.
When you listen to a coal mining song, you encounter:
- Dialect: Regional language that encodes place and identity
- Labour rhythm: Songs often matched the tempo of work — coordinating movement, marking time
- Social function: Who sang? When? For what purpose? The performance context shapes meaning
- Affect: The emotional texture of community life — solidarity, complaint, celebration, grief
What Documents Miss
None of this appears in company records, government statistics, or architectural surveys. Sound offers access to dimensions of historical experience that document-based history cannot reach.
Limitations of Sound Evidence
But sound evidence has its own limitations. The 1961 Folkways recordings are performances staged for a microphone — not spontaneous expressions of community life. The singers knew they were being recorded for an international audience. The songs were selected by an ethnomusicologist with his own preservation agenda.
What we hear is mediated, curated, framed. This is true of all historical evidence. The task is not to find unmediated access to the past, but to read sources critically, aware of what they can and cannot reveal.
Convergence
The Central Question
These four songs come from very different places: northeastern Japan (Jōban), southern Kyushu (Kagoshima and Chikuhō), and the Sea of Japan coast (Iwai). You have listened to each. You have heard the differences in dialect, rhythm, instrumentation.
Now imagine these traditions converging on a single island of 6.3 hectares. What might happen when workers from such different regions live in close quarters?
What We Don't Know
Do traditions blend, compete, or disappear? We have evidence of what workers brought — the Folkways recordings document the source cultures. But we have no documented folk songs from Hashima itself.
The silence may reflect absence of practice, suppression by corporate control, displacement by mass media, or simply absence of documentation. Episode 05 explores what happened to these traditions in Mitsubishi's controlled environment.
Continue to Episode 05
The companion episode The Company Town examines what happened when regional cultures converged on Hashima — and why no folk songs survive from the island itself.