Hi gals and boys, I’m publish this post to apologize and give the reason for which I can not update this week.
1. I’m preparing a video for a website called Ulule.com which works exactly like kickstarter.com. The intention is to raise funds to try to get some cash doing Tinkers of the Wasteland. If this is not possible, don’t worry, the web-comic will continue on the road as today.
2. I’m taking a writers course and I need to finish some assignments. I’m starting a novel that I have faith you’d like once finish with it.
3. I made a trip that it didn’t left me so much time to continue doing my duties. This weekend I fulfilled one of my dreams, I went to the island of Hashima / Gunkanjima, Japan. A deserted island since 1974 with a post-apocalyptic look. I’m sharing here the story I wrote in my diary. I cannot say that the text is ready to be read by you but I tried to do my best to translate it. Talk soon.
South of Japan, Hashima Island / Gunkanjima, 2012.
When I left the harbor I could see a lot of ship factories. Huge framed metal structures embracing the incomplete bodies of whales of steel, made by titanium and carbon fiber getting ready to be born. The sea was rocking the ferry while I was heading to the island and as I went in to the sea, the waves were getting stronger and there was a possibility of not being able to arrive at the island. Meanwhile, from the top of the ferry I was filming and watching the landscape. I did not know if the sea breeze or light rain drops interposed between the lens of my camera and the abandoned island. But I wasn’t worried about it, I was enjoying the encounter. It looked impressive when I was going to arrive. A place that hides behind it good memories and experiences of abandonment. Hashima Island, is best known as Gunkanjima, “battleship” in english. It was discovered in 1810, and at the same time they realized that under the island it was the fossil fuel from the times of industrial revolution, the coal. That one than the land itself takes years to make, and for men it takes hours to be consumed. Mitsubishi company bought the island in 1890 in a hundred thousand yen, about a thousand five hundred dollars. For sure in those days it was a fortune. A hundred years later, when the island was no longer able to give more of itself, when coal was not longer housed in the depths of the earth, the inhabitants abandoned the island in January 1974, being totally deserted in April of that year . I could see a wall where a little boy left a message saying “Please take care of my fish golden fish and my bird, I have to leave.”
Since the island is only 25 minutes by boat from the city of Nagasaki, I can imagine that the inhabitants of the island witnessed from afar the mushroom cloud that caused the atomic bomb in 1945. To my great surprise, the tour guide, was one of the locals that told me that when the explosion occurred, he felt the island shook.
I could take a picture with the guide, because for me it’s great that I could met one of the people who took part in this story.
Definitely I would repeat this kind of experience. I felt free, it made me feel amazed, the island imposed by its mystery and abandonment. A monster of concrete that if it can talk about what happened, I definitely would like to hear it.
