The ticket hall
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.
Behind the counter a man was still talking, louder than he had been a moment ago. Everybody else in the ticket hall at Kōnoura had stopped what they were doing. Nobody spoke English. I didn’t speak Japanese.
Three in the morning
Rewind about seven 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 three 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. 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.
One day
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 mine workers 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.
As the sun came up I pointed the car north up the coast, toward the ferry.
The ferry to Ikeshima leaves from two 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. 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 mine went from excitement to despair. 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 save 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. I told him, excitedly, that it was very fine, 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 mine workers 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.”
He asked if I had ever been to Uluru. I said no. I would like to, but it is difficult to get to and a long way from where I live in Sydney.
>>“But right now you are on a ferry in Japan, heading to an island off the coast. Isn’t that more difficult than getting to Uluru?”
Aside from “yes”, I didn’t really have a response to that.
Speaking of national landmarks, I showed him a time-lapse of Mt Fuji I had set up in our hotel room while we were staying in Tokyo.
>>“Mt Fuji is such an impressive sight for me to see. The way it towers over a sprawling city, and the fact there are just no mountains like this anywhere in Australia, it is just infinitely interesting to look at. But having lived in Tokyo for your entire life, you’ve seen it many times over many years. Is it still just as impressive as it ever was, or is it something that is just part of the view to you?”
“It still looks as impressive as it ever was. I never get tired of looking at it.”
Then we got back to talking about the landmark we were both heading for, Ikeshima.
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
The island in the 1960s, the decade the No. 1 shaft went down. The harbour is already cut into the north-east end, the surface plant is hard up against it, and the apartment blocks of Ikeshima-machi stand in rows across the southern half of the rock.
A few years past the peak. About 7,770 people lived here in 1970, on about 0.86 km² of rock, roughly 9,000 to the square kilometre, in reinforced-concrete blocks the company put up in rows because there was nowhere to go but up. By now the main faces are out under the seabed toward Hikishima.
Now. The mine closed in 2001 and the vegetation has been coming up through the blocks ever since. The rows are there under it, and so is the harbour.
The island
Then the ramp came down and we drove off, parked a little way up, and walked from there, up past the Ikeshima Coal-Fired Power Station, the chimney white over the road, the boiler house a dark tangle of ducts and platforms beside it, the long turbine hall below and the wooded hill going up behind. We walked past that and past a few other buildings, Yu looking at everything, and me looking at everything through the F100, with no way of knowing whether 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. On the wall of a corner building was a map of the island for visitors. Over the top of the trees at the end of that street stood the No. 1 shaft headframe, rusted through to orange, and on the mainland ridge across the water, a row of wind turbines. The road went under an overpass with vines 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 had since gone back to green, and from up there you could see Nagasaki Municipal Ikeshima Junior High School across the tall grass, a long white two-storey block with yellow panels along its upper floor, sitting under a wooded hill with a water tank on its crest. In among it all was a car, parked and left, and the creeper had gone over the bodywork and in through the seals and filled the entire cabin, so that leaves pressed against the inside of the glass.
Then the housing starts, and it does not stop: company blocks in reinforced concrete, storey on storey, in rows, where a mainland pit town would have spread out in low timber terraces. The vegetation has got into all of them. It comes up the walls and across the balconies and through the window frames, with grass gone to seed at their feet, 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 across it to Matsushima, where the white chimney of the J-POWER Matsushima Power Station stands against the hills. From 1981 that station burned the coal raised on this island.
We walked the paths between the blocks. We tried doors, a lot of doors, and most of them were bolted. A grey tabby with a white chest 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, a brown tabby and a black and white, and did not get up either. There are a lot of cats on Ikeshima now, by the look of it about as many as there are people.
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 No. 2 Shaft Office. The winder house. The No. 2 headframe leaning out over it. 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.
>>“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 dropping through the scrub with a rusted handrail on the seaward side, and below it the flat roof of the No. 2 Shaft Office with the rain still lying on it, and past that nothing but water to the horizon.
At the bottom the winder house stands at the edge of a concrete forecourt, one whole end of it overgrown, solid green from the ground to the roofline, and the No. 2 headframe leans out over the roof with its head sheave still up in the steel.
In the middle of the forecourt there is a round bed with a bronze figure on a stone plinth, one arm raised to the sky. She is Jikai (女神像 慈海), and her name is written with the characters for mercy and the sea. She is recorded as having been put up in 1983 as a prayer for safety, and she is said to face the workings, which lay out under the water. We walked past her to the No. 2 Shaft Office, and an open door presented itself straight away. It took us into the pithead bath.
This is where the mine workers washed the coal off at the end of a shift, a few steps from the cage that had brought them up. A long tiled hall, dark after the forecourt, 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. Long concrete troughs down the length of the floor, a row of rusted basins along the wall with the taps still fitted above them, and a vent fan up on the far wall above the windows.
I do not think either of us said anything for a while. We just stood there looking around in awe, Yu in the first building like this he had ever been inside.
And that was where I made my first frame on film inside an abandoned building. There was no screen on the back to check it on. I would not know whether it had worked until the scans came back.
From the bath we went on into the offices. There was a store room with a steel shelving unit hard against the window, dead vines across the glass outside and green leaves pressing at the lower panes, so the daylight came in filtered through both. There was a room with nothing in it but a wide window with the glass gone and a vine coming in over the sill, and through it the grass and the sea toward Hikishima. And upstairs there was a corner office glazed on two sides, the sea in every window and the ceiling down across the floor in sections.
The control room
Then the control room. A curved console with monitors and keyboards and telephones on it, one of them orange, and drawings spread across the desk. Every wall behind it is panels: gauges and switches and rows of indicator lamps under Japanese labels, a bank of screens along the top, and down on the green cabinet under the desk a maker’s plate that says Matsushima Electric. From this desk, in a room the size of a lounge, the surface plant around the No. 2 shaft was watched over.
From beside the desk the room goes on: 12 small screens sitting dark in a grey console, two office chairs turned toward them, and binders on the cabinet labelled 検針明細書, the meter-reading statements.
And there is the briefing room, timber benches and trestle tables in rows facing two green chalkboards, ceiling fans overhead, 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 translates as now matters more than later: inspect and confirm.
It was there in the safety offices, still with most of the building unseen, that I looked at the time.
A later 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.”
He couldn’t decide whether to stay or head back to Seto. We had about an hour before we needed to make our way back to the ferry office, and he said he’d spend it deciding. So we kept exploring. When the time came to leave, I asked him what he’d decided. He still couldn’t make up his mind.
>>“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.
The winder house
The last of it was the winder house, the building the No. 2 headframe leans over. The winder itself fills one side of the hall: a pale blue drive pulley 6 m across, fenced off behind yellow safety rails. The rope that ran over it went up to the head sheave and down the shaft to the cage.
The machine hall runs on from it, the overhead travelling crane parked on its rails with the hook hanging, and a walkway with yellow rails running down beside a grey drive unit in a Toshiba housing, its porthole doors shut, with smaller motors bolted to the floor below the rail. The paint has come off the floor in sheets.
Up a level, behind a window with the blinds still hanging, is the winder driver’s control room, every steel panel of it gone to rust, a telephone handset lying on the console, small monitors stacked on a shelf, and a single office chair facing the desk. From that chair the driver ran the cage.
The outer shore
We came out and walked down around the outer shore of the island, where the older infrastructure stands about in the grass. The No. 1 shaft headframe is down there, the older of the island’s two: a square lattice tower gone to a deep rust-orange with both head sheaves in it, one above the other, a corrugated shed at its foot and a timber pole leaning on its stay wire beside it. From underneath, the whole tower fills the sky, the landings and their handrails stacked up inside the steel.
A pair of concrete A-frames stand in the old coal stockyard, weathered grey, with a twisted stub of steel bolted to the top of the taller one and the mainland hills across the water behind them. The conveyor they carried ran from the stockpile out to the loader on the harbour wall, which put the coal straight into ships.
Across the way a spider the size of my palm had strung her web, banded yellow and slate blue with yellow rings on her black legs, the seeds of the grass caught in it, and we walked around her. Yu knew her: a jorō spider (ジョロウグモ, jorōgumo).
At the edge of the seawall a traffic mirror on a white pole had tipped down so that it held the roadside instead of the road, and a faded sticker on the pole still said 注意, caution.
The 5 PM ferry
The sun was getting low by the time we came round toward the ferry office. The power station had gone to silhouette against it, the boiler house a dark mass of ducts and ladders with the chimney still white beside it.
The apartments closest to where the ferry docks, where we had got off that morning, are ones people still live in. The low sun had turned the render yellow, and there were cats all over it: two on the entry ledge beside the electricity meters, a ginger on the wall under the balcony rail, a white one on the doorstep, more on the pavement, seven or eight in one frame. About 111 people were still living on Ikeshima at the last count, in 2021, most of them retired mine workers and their families.
On the grass beside the road nearby sits a small blue fibreglass boat with ガンバレ日本 painted on its hull by hand, ガンバレ in black and 日本 in red. A handmade Hello Kitty looks out over the gunwale.
Ganbare Nippon. Ganbare comes from ganbaru, a verb English needs several words for: to hold on through something hard and see it through to the end. Said to someone, it means hang in there, keep going, don’t give up. Ganbare Nippon says it to the whole country. It is the cheer for Japan’s teams at the Olympics, and in 2011, after the earthquake and tsunami, it was everywhere.
And then we could see the ferry itself, white and pale green, a long way out on dark blue water with the mainland hills 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 five o’clock ferry was not going back to Seto. Because we had changed our schedule, 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.
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 dredged and opened to the sea on its east side to make the harbour. The pond in Pond Island is the harbour the ferry comes into.
Ikeshima is a postwar mine. There was no mine here during the war, so the history of wartime forced labour carried by the other coal islands off Nagasaki, Hashima and Takashima, is not its history. 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.
The first vertical shaft, the No. 1, was finished in 1967, and the same year the island got its own coal-fired power station and a plant turning seawater into drinking water, because a rock 7 km out in the Gotō Sea could not be run on mains from the shore. The company’s apartment blocks came with communal bathhouses and shared laundries, and the rent, just before the closure, was about 400 yen.
The coal lay under the sea. The whole worked field was 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.
Mine workers went down the No. 2 shaft, 733 m deep, in a three-deck cage that took 81 at a time, wound by the 600 kW Koepe winder at up to 10 m/s, and at the minus 650 level 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 say that when new German-built man-cars arrived in November 1996, the staff and their families were asked to name them, and they chose the statue’s name: Megami-gō and Jikai, the goddess and the merciful sea. One of the sets is still on the island. By 1990 the roadways underground added up to about 100 km.
The coal was good. Weakly caking, low in sulphur, about 7,500 kcal a kilo, sold as a coking blend and, from 1981 until the end, burned at Matsushima. Output peaked in 1985 at over 1.5 million tonnes, and ran at around 1.2 million tonnes a year from the late 1970s into the 1990s. 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. Nothing on the scale of the disasters at Miike or Yubari is recorded here.
Policy and price closed it. 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 one nobody would pay. The last descent was on 28 November 2001. The mine closed the next day, 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.
The mine was not sealed. It had been training mine workers 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 mine workers 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 people 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 five former mine workers 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.
