Tomogashima

Tomogashima is a group of uninhabited islands in the strait between Wakayama and Awaji, and from the 1890s the army fortified them to close the approach to Osaka Bay. Batteries, magazines, barracks and tunnels were built in brick, never fired a shot in war, and were abandoned. The forest has been taking them back for a century.

What is there now is red-brick arcading under moss, arched magazine chambers you walk into with a torch, gun emplacements open to the sky and a lighthouse from 1872. The comparison people reach for is Laputa, and for once it is fair. A ferry runs twenty minutes from Kada, there is nothing on the island but a small shop and a campsite, and the full circuit takes three or four hours on rough paths.