You can go, but you can't come back
The woman in front of me in the queue held up her phone so I could read the screen.
You can go to Ikeshima, but you can't come back.
I had been in the ticket hall at Kōnoura for about 4 minutes. Behind the counter a man was still talking, louder than he had been a moment ago, and the woman who had been smiling at me when I joined the line was not smiling any more. Everybody else in the room had stopped what they were doing. Nobody spoke English. I didn't speak Japanese. And the only sentence that had crossed between us so far was the one on the phone, which I read twice, then a third time, hoping it would say something else.
This is a story about how I got to Ikeshima, what I found there, and how I got back. The middle part is a coal mine. The rest is a ferry timetable and a man called Yu.
Three in the morning
Rewind about 7 hours.
We were staying in Nagasaki. It's a beautiful place and I liked it a lot, which is a problem when you can't sleep, because at 3 in the morning there is nothing to do with that except get up. So I took the hire car out and drove around the streets looking for something to photograph.
I had a Nikon F100 with me and a bag of film. I'd only recently got into film, and I had decided before we left home that everything on this trip was going on it. No digital body as a safety net. Whatever came back from the lab was what I got.
What I got at 3 am was convenience stores. A Family Mart on its own at the end of a street with nothing else lit for a block in any direction, and a 7-Eleven a bit later that looked exactly as alone. If you have driven around a Japanese city before dawn you know that the konbini is the only thing awake, and there is something about a lit box in a dark street that a photographer cannot leave alone.
The reason I was up at all, apart from the not sleeping, was that this was my one day. It was a family holiday, and I had one day carved out of it to go and do the thing I do, which is photograph abandoned buildings. I had wanted to see Ikeshima for a long time. It was the last new coal mine to open in Japan, in 1959, and the last large-scale one to close, in 2001, and the whole town the company built for the miners is still standing on the island. I knew there would be a lot to walk through. I also knew it was going to be the first abandoned place I had ever photographed on film, after more than a decade of shooting them digitally, and I was more nervous about that than I was letting on.
As the sun came up I pointed the car north up the coast, toward the ferry.
The wrong port
The ferry to Ikeshima leaves from 2 ports on the mainland, Seto and Kōnoura. I had read the timetable the night before and I was sure it was Seto. So I drove to Seto.
The way there is the coast road up the Nishi-Sonogi Peninsula, out past Miedamachi and along the water for most of it.
It was fully light when I got there. The terminal was a waiting room with a view of the water, and there was nobody in it. No staff, no passengers, nobody outside. Just posters and noticeboards, and every word on them in Japanese.
I don't read Japanese. Not a character of it. So I stood in front of a wall of posters and notices, and I could not pick out one feature on any of them that told me what it was for. A timetable looks like a poster looks like a safety notice when you cannot read the words. The only way in was to hold my phone up to each one, take a photo, and let Google Translate have a go at it, one notice at a time, all the way along the wall. Most of what came back was not about ferries at all. None of it said Ikeshima. And there was still nobody to ask.
Then a ferry appeared, some way out, and it looked like it was coming in. It did come in. It tied up, the ramp went down, and one man walked off it. One. I waved at him and pointed at the ferry. "Ikeshima?"
He shook his head. Then he gestured back down the coast, the way I had come, with the kind of wave you give when the answer is not close.
The Ikeshima ferry leaves from Seto, and it leaves from Kōnoura. That morning, the one I wanted was leaving from Kōnoura, the port I had driven straight past about half an hour earlier. I had got a time wrong, or a port wrong, or both. So I got back in the car and drove back down the coast to the place I should have gone to in the first place.
Kōnoura
Kōnoura was different straight away. There was a short queue of people at the ticket window, and the walls had posters of Ikeshima on them, and for the first time that morning I felt like I was in the right place.
I joined the end of the line. The Japanese woman in front of me turned around and smiled, and I smiled back and asked, a bit sheepishly, the one word I had.
>>"Ikeshima?"
"Hai!"
She nodded when she said it, quite excited on my behalf, and with my very limited Japanese I took that to mean I was on the right track.
The man behind the counter had heard all of this. He had heard me ask about Ikeshima and he had heard her say yes, and he started saying something to her, loudly and in what seemed to be a fairly serious tone. Her face changed. The excitement went out of it and something closer to concern came in. She turned back to me and tried to pass on what he had said, in Japanese, and I couldn't follow a word of it. Then he tried, over her shoulder, with what was clearly a sense of urgency. It was no good. I could not understand anything either of them was saying, and they knew it.
Then she had an idea. You could see it arrive. She held up one finger, said "chotto matte," and went digging in her bag for her phone. She opened Google Translate, spoke into it, and turned the screen to me.
You can go to Ikeshima, but you can't come back.
I can only imagine what my face did. I had watched hers go from excitement to concern about a minute earlier and now I was doing the same thing in the other direction, reading a sentence that made no sense and made complete sense at the same time. And around me was a room full of Japanese people who, as far as I could tell, spoke no English, and one Australian who spoke no Japanese, all of us looking at each other, and all of them, I think, wondering the same thing: how do we stop this man from making a big mistake today?
Then a man who had been sitting to one side stood up.
>>"Ah, excuse me. I speak English. Am I able to help?"
There was a gasp. An actual, unanimous gasp of relief from everybody in that room, the woman, the ticket officer and me all thanking him at once. He spoke with the two of them for a short moment. Then he came back to me.
>>"What they are trying to say is that the ferry that is returning from Ikeshima will not come back to this port at Kōnoura. It will be returning to Seto port. That is much too far to come back to by walking. So if you want to go to Ikeshima, you need to take your car on the ferry to Ikeshima, and then back to Seto port, so you are able to get home at the end of the day. Is that OK?"
Seto, where I had just been, back up the coast road. It was completely OK. I said so, with more enthusiasm than the sentence needed, and bought a ticket for me and the car.
Then I turned back to him.
>>"Now you have to come with me for the rest of the day."
"Well, I am going to Ikeshima too. We can go together!"
Two cars on a ferry
So we both drove our cars onto the ferry when it came in, and once it had cleared the harbour we went up to the top deck to watch the coast get smaller behind us while the island got sharper in front.
His name was Yu. He was from Tokyo, on holiday, working his way around the historical sites of Nagasaki. I told him I was from Sydney, on a family holiday, and that this was my one day out to photograph abandoned buildings, so I was making the most of it. We got onto photography. He showed me some of the places he had been and shot on his phone, landscapes mostly, and the outsides of landmarks. He wasn't an urban explorer. He had never been inside a building like the ones I go into.
He asked if I was going on the tour, the one the former miners run, where they take you down the mine. I said I would probably be doing more of a self-guided tour than the official one offered, and showed him my Instagram.
He went quiet while he scrolled. Then he looked up.
>>"Are you allowed to do this?"
"There wasn't a sign saying I can't."
He laughed.
>>"What if there are signs there today?"
"I can't read Japanese."
He smiled at that.
>>"Can you show me?"
"Of course. I already said you have to come with me."
It is about 7 km of water from Kōnoura to Ikeshima, half an hour or so. The island does what everybody says it does when you approach it from the sea, which is turn from a green lump into a wall of concrete apartment blocks stacked up a hill, with the mine's surface plant and a chimney down at the water's edge.
Sixty years from above
This is the island before the first vertical shaft was finished, and before the workings went out under the sea toward Hikishima. The harbour is already cut into the north east corner, and the settlement is already running down the spine of the rock.
A few years past the peak. Nearly 7,800 people lived here in 1970, on 1.08 km², in reinforced-concrete blocks the company put up in rows because there was nowhere to go but up. The coal is coming from about 650 m below sea level, out under the water.
Now. The mine closed on 29 November 2001 and the vegetation has been coming up through the blocks ever since. The streets are still there, the harbour is still there, and 111 people were still living here at the last count, in 2021.
The island
The power station and the boiler house, first thing up from the port.
Then the ramp came down and we drove off. We walked up from the port past the power station and the boiler house. The island had its own coal-fired power station and a plant for turning seawater into drinking water, both from 1967, because you cannot run mains to a rock 7 km out in the Gotō Sea, and the chimney still stands over the road, a white stack with steel walkways and rusted pipework climbing the plant beside it and the wooded hill going up behind. We walked past that and past a few other buildings, Yu looking at everything, me looking at everything through a viewfinder for the first time in a long time and not being sure I was getting any of it.
The roads are the strange part at first. They are proper roads, with kerbs and white centre lines and a pedestrian crossing painted so fresh it looked like it had been done that week, and crossing signs on blue poles, and nobody on them. At one corner a board on a post carried a map of the island for visitors. Over the top of the trees at the end of that street was a rusted headframe, and on the mainland ridge across the water, a row of wind turbines. The road went under an overpass with ivy hanging off the concrete, and Yu walked ahead of me through it with his backpack on, and out the other side along a guardrail with the scrub coming over it in yellow.
Somewhere along there Yu asked me the practical question. How do you tell which buildings are the ones you can go into?
>>"There is usually a sign saying keep out."
He took that on board.
We wandered up the main hill of the island, through what had been villages and were now mostly green, and from up there you could see the school, well over on the other side of the island, a long white two-storey block with its shutters still on, sitting under a wooded hill with a couple of tanks on top, and a whole field of pampas grass between us and it. In among it all was a car, an ordinary dark hatchback, parked and left, and the vines had gone over the roof and in through the door seals and down the windows until you could only find it through gaps in the leaves.
Then the housing starts, and it does not stop. Ikeshima had 7,770 people living on it in 1970, its peak, on a rock about 1 km across, and the only way to fit them was to go up. So the company built reinforced-concrete apartment blocks, storey on storey, in rows, and the rows are still there, and the vegetation has got into all of them. It comes up the walls and across the balconies and through the window frames, ivy and creeper and pampas grass gone to seed, so that some of the blocks read as green shapes with a building somewhere underneath.
From an upper window of one you look out past the poles and wires and a low concrete roof to open sea, and the mainland, and a chimney over there on the far shore.
Out of an upper window, across to the mainland.
We walked the paths between the blocks. We tried doors, a lot of doors, and most of them were bolted. A tabby with a white bib watched us do it from the top of a block wall and did not get up. Two more sat loafed side by side on a concrete ledge in a corner of a rendered wall, a brown tabby and a black and white, and did not get up either. There are a lot of cats on Ikeshima now. The island had 111 residents at the last count, in 2021, most of them retired miners and their families, and by the look of it about the same number of cats, and the cats are less bothered by visitors.
The paths and roads up there are overgrown to the point where you are walking through them as much as along them. We kept going, following whichever way was open, until the ground fell away in front of us and we were looking down a hill at a gate, and past the gate at the mine. The offices. The winding house. A headframe standing over the shaft. And on the gate, a sign that even I could read the intent of.
>>"If you ever wanted to see inside haikyo, this is where you can. Do you want to climb over this fence?"
Haikyo is the Japanese word for ruins, and for the people who go into them. Yu thought about it.
>>"Let me have a look around for any cameras."
Over the gate
He had a look around. There was a pause for thought. Then he said yes, let's go in. So we pulled ourselves up over the gate using a pole to one side of it and went down.
The way down is a concrete stair between the scrub with a rusted rail on the seaward side, and below it the flat roofs of the mine buildings, and past them nothing but water to the horizon.
At the bottom the winding house stands in a yard of cracked asphalt with the creeper grown over one whole end of it, solid green to the roofline, and the headframe leans out over it with the sheave wheels still up in the steel.
In the middle of the yard there is a round bed with a bronze figure on a plinth, one arm raised to the sky, with the grass grown up to the kerb around it. We walked past that to the mine buildings, and an open door presented itself straight away. It took us into the bathhouses.
Every mine has one and this was the miners' one. A long tiled hall, dark after the yard, with a drain channel running down the middle of the floor toward a row of windows at the far end that were the only light in the room.
Sunken baths with curved concrete ends on either side of the channel, big enough for a shift. Along the walls a trough the full length of the room with the taps still in a row above it, the pipe runs bracketed to the wall, a clock still up on the end wall, the tiles gone the colour of the water that used to run over them.
I do not think either of us said anything for a while. We just stood there looking. Yu had never been inside a building like this in his life and I had been inside a hundred of them and it did not make much difference. That room does that to you.
And that was where I made my first frame on film inside an abandoned building. I would love to tell you it felt momentous. It felt like standing in a wet room with a camera that does not show you what you just did, which is exactly the thing I had come for.
From the bathhouse we went through into the winding house next door, the building the headframe leans over. It is one long shed under a steel roof with the daylight coming through the ridge, and the overhead travelling crane still parked on its rails with the hook hanging, and a walkway with yellow rails running down beside the winding gear: a grey-blue casing the length of a small truck with Toshiba lettered on the side, and the motors and pumps still bolted to the floor in front of it. The paint has come off the floor in sheets and there was water lying on it.
Up a level, behind a window with the blinds still hanging, is the winder driver's cabin, everything in it gone to rust except the row of little monitors stacked above the desk, the telephone on the desk and the office chair pulled back from it.
Then the offices, and the control room. The control room is the room I had come for without knowing it. A curved console with monitors and keyboards and telephones still on it, one of them orange, and paper still spread across the desk. Every wall behind it is panels: gauges and switches and rows of indicator lights under Japanese labels, a bank of screens along the top, a maker's plate on the cabinet that says Matsushima Electric.
The whole nervous system of a mine that reached 650 m below sea level and ran out under the seabed for kilometres, in a room the size of a lounge.
Next door is an office with more monitors and a cabinet of numbered panels, two swivel chairs pushed back, a fire extinguisher, and binders on the shelf that Yu read as meter-reading statements.
There is a room where a metal shelving unit stands against the only window and vines have come in through it and grown along the shelves among the tools and the tins. There is a room with nothing in it at all but a wide window with the glass gone, the plaster cracked in a web around it, a creeper coming in over the sill, and through it the grass and the sea.
And there is the briefing hall, wooden benches and long tables in rows facing green chalkboards, ceiling fans still up, a telephone on the front table, and a banner across the wall above the boards.
This is the other thing about having Yu there that I had not thought about on the ferry. I had spent the morning photographing notices to find out what they said. Now I had someone who could just read them. He read the banner out and told me what it meant. It says あとでよりいまが大切「点検と確認」, which comes out as something like now matters more than later: check, and confirm. The way Yu put it, I took it for the Japanese equivalent of measure twice, cut once. A mine that went 650 m under the sea, and that was the sentence on the wall of the room where the shift started.
It was in one of those rooms, still with most of the building unseen, that I looked at the time.
The 5 PM ferry
We had seen a very small part of what was there, and the ferry we had planned to take was not far off.
"I wish the ferry was coming later, there is so much that we haven't seen yet."
"There is a later ferry; maybe we could get that one and stay longer. Let me call the ferry office."
So he called them. Another turn for my knight in samurai armour, helping the poorly prepared traveller out of another pickle. There was a short conversation. He put his phone away.
"Yes, there is another ferry leaving at 5:00. But I'm not sure if I should stay that long. Let's do janken."
Janken. Paper, scissors, rock. I chose rock. He chose paper. I hunched over a bit. Yu looked at me hunched over.
"Let's just catch the 5 PM ferry anyway."
I was ecstatic, and we went back to it for the rest of the day.
We finished in the buildings and came out and walked down around the outer shore of the island, where the older infrastructure stands about in the grass. A second headframe, rusting lattice against the sky with the wheels still in it, a corrugated shed at its foot and a timber pole leaning on its stay wire beside it, and further on a taller one, the tallest thing on the island, rust the whole way up.
A pair of concrete A-frames on the coastal grassland with the broken remains of a conveyor at the top of the taller one and the mainland hills across the water behind them.
A spider the size of my palm, yellow and black bands on its body and legs, in a web strung across the way with the seeds of the grass caught in it, which we walked around.
A traffic mirror on a white pole at the edge of the seawall, facing down at the water as if there were still something coming round the corner to watch for.
The sun was getting low by the time we came round toward the ferry office, and as we did we could see the ferry itself, white and pale green, a long way out on dark blue water with the ridgeline behind it, coming for us.
When we got to the wharf it was time for Yu to step in and save me one last time. We had changed ferries, so we needed new tickets, and this time he handled the whole thing without either of us needing to ask "can I help?" We all knew it was a given.
And here is the final twist of the day. The 5 o'clock ferry was not going back to Seto. Because we had changed sailings, this one was going back to Kōnoura, the port we had left from that morning. After all that, the ferry came back to exactly where my car would have been. I had not needed to bring it at all.
We stood on the deck and watched Ikeshima go small and dark behind us, and the sun go down beside it, the whole sky orange and pink over a sea just rough enough to catch it. I shot the last of the roll there, on a moving boat, in falling light, and every frame of it came back.
At Kōnoura I thanked Yu for all his help, and for being with me for one of the most enjoyable days of my life. Then we got into our separate hire cars and drove back to Nagasaki.
Pond Island
Ikeshima means Pond Island. The pond, Kagamigaike, the mirror pond, was filled in to build the harbour, so the thing the island is named after is the one thing on it that no longer exists.
The mine is a postwar mine. That matters, because the other coal islands off Nagasaki, Hashima and Takashima, carry a wartime history of forced labour that Ikeshima does not share. There was no mine here during the war. Matsushima Coal Mining, a Mitsui company whose roots go back to a concession bought at Ōseto in 1913, put its plan for a new mine at Ikeshima to the government in 1947.
Boring from the sea began in 1948 and found the seams. Development began in the early 1950s, the workings reached coal in September 1955, and the port was finished in 1958. In 1959 the mine started producing, and with that Ikeshima became the last new coal mine ever opened in Japan.
Everything about it was decided by the fact that the coal was not under the island. It was under the sea. The whole worked field lay beneath the seabed, the deepest workings about 650 m below sea level, and from 1974 the main faces were out under the water around a pair of islets called Hikishima, 4 to 5 km to the west.
Miners went down the second vertical shaft to the minus 650 level and then rode out to the faces on a high-speed man-car line. The engineering record has a train running 5,477 m from the first stop to the south stop at up to 50 km/h, cutting the one-way trip to 12 minutes, with moving walkways beyond that. Japanese accounts name the German-built trains, the Megami-gō and the Jikai, and one of the sets is still on the island. By the 1990s the roadways underground added up to about 96 km.
The other thing the sea decided was the town. Nearly 7,800 people lived on Ikeshima at the 1970 peak, on 1.08 km² of rock, so the company went up instead of out: reinforced-concrete apartment blocks with communal bathhouses and shared laundries, and rent, just before the end, of about 400 yen. The island had its own coal-fired power station and its own seawater desalination plant from 1967, because nothing could be piped in. When you walk the rows of blocks now, that is what you are walking through: a company town that had to carry everything it needed on its own back.
The coal was good. Weakly caking, low in sulphur, about 7,500 kcal a kilo, sold as a coking blend and burned in J-POWER's Matsushima Power Station across the water from 1981 until the end. Output peaked in 1985 at over 1.5 million tonnes, and ran at around 1.2 million tonnes a year through the late 1970s and into the 1990s. It was not a clean-record mine. An underground fire in February 2000 is on the record, and so are two fatal accidents in 1995, and a 2006 settlement with former workers over pneumoconiosis, the dust disease. What it was not was a disaster mine; nothing on the scale of Miike or Yubari is recorded here.
What closed it was policy and price, not the seams. In 1987 Japan moved to a phased reduction of domestic coal, and in 1998 the electricity market was liberalised and the gap between Ikeshima coal and imported coal became a gap nobody would pay. The last descent was on 28 November 2001. The mine closed the next day, 29 November 2001, and about 2,500 people lost their jobs. That was the end of large-scale coal mining in Japan; a small operation at Kushiro in Hokkaido kept going, but nothing on this scale. The closure ceremony was held the following March.
Then something unusual happened, which is that the mine did not get sealed. It had been training miners from overseas since the late 1980s, about 500 people from 28 countries while it was still working, and from 2002 the site ran a government-backed programme teaching Japanese deep-mining methods to countries that were still digging, Indonesia and Vietnam among them. The workings were kept open because they were still a school. From 2003 they were also a tour: former Ikeshima miners taking visitors underground in an electric trolley to a preserved gallery with a drum cutter standing at a reconstructed face. For a long time that was the only place in Japan you could go down a coal mine with the men who had worked it.
That is ending. Visitor numbers fell from 6,122 in the 2018 financial year to 3,526 in 2024. The plant is old, the cost of fixing it was put at about 225 million yen, and the 5 former miners who guide the tours are in their late sixties and early seventies. In September 2025 Nagasaki City's assembly passed an ordinance abolishing the experience facility at the end of the 2026 financial year. The island stays. The apartment blocks stay. The 111 residents, and the cats, stay. But the one thing that made Ikeshima different from every other closed mine in the country, that you could still go down it with the people who dug it, is closing on a decision about maintenance and the age of five men.
I did not go down. I went into the bathhouse and the offices instead, over a gate, with someone I had met that morning in a ticket queue. I am not going to pretend that is the better way to see it. But it is the way I saw it.
