Dream Island (Yume No Shima)

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Dream Island (Yume No Shima/Yumeno-Shima/夢の島 in Japanese) is an artificial island in Tokyo Bay made completely of trash.

It was started in the late 1960s (though some accounts say it might have been started as early as the late 1950s or as late as the early 1970s) by the Tokyo municipal/prefectural government as a hopeful solution to some of the woes of the garbage problem in the city of Tokyo which was in the throes of great debate about what to do about the tens of thousands of tons of garbage produced daily in the thriving metropolis.

At one time the island was even the home of the Daigo Fukuryū Maru, a fishing boat which had been exposed to nuclear fallout during the Bikini Atoll test. The boat was sold to a scrap dealer in the 1960s (the levels of radiation had dropped to safe levels in the mid 1950s), and abandoned there.

In 1965, Dream Island was the cause of a large plague of flies that spread over the eastern part of Tokyo.

Today the island has been covered over with a layer of top soil and boasts among its features a sports park (with baseball and soccer fields and a gymnasium), a tropical greenhouse, the Fukuryu Maru Memorial Museum, a large-scale yacht harbor, waste disposal and incinerating facilities.

[edit] Trivia

• Susumu Hirasawa named the theme to Paranoia Agent after Yume no Shima.