I guess it is not much different from Alcatraz except that the 5000 inhabitants of Gunkan-Jima, an Island 19km from Nagasaki covered with ruins and rusty metal, were employed in coal mining rather than being imprisoned. With the planned opening of the island as a tourist attraction sometime in 2008, the similarities get stronger. In case you haven't heard of it, Gunkan-Jima was a company town built on an island which was used for submarine coal mining. In 1974 the mine shut down and the island was abandoned. Photos show that people just left and never went back. Because the island was very small the buildings were very closely packed and the resulting ruins with the abandoned belongings look very post-apocalyptic. Here is a link to a site which has an extensive photo gallery:
http://www.gunkanjima-odyssey.com/GS21.htm
Don't worry that you can't read Japanese, the pictures in the main gallery speak for themselves.
And here, thanks to the miracle (?) of machine-translation is the announcement that it will be turned into a tourist attraction.
What modern ruins are in your part of the world? How are they being used to entertain or educate people?
