Control Room

The control room at Ashio Copper Mine is a single panelled room with a long mimic-board running the length of one wall. The board is studded with toggle switches, lamps, and analogue dials, the labels still legible in places, faded or peeled in others. A handwritten note is taped to one of the panels in Japanese; it has yellowed but is still readable. The desk in front of the board has a single chair. There are two telephones, both still cabled into the wall. The light fittings overhead are out, but daylight comes through a window high on the back wall.

This was the room from which the entire processing plant was monitored. The mimic-board was a wired diagram of the works. Each switch, lamp, and dial corresponded to a pump, a conveyor, a flotation cell, or a furnace somewhere out in the building. Operators sat here for shifts watching the lights for warning conditions and adjusting flows by the hour. Mining at Ashio continued until 1973. After the mine closed, the control room stayed locked but otherwise untouched. The handwritten note is most likely a shift-change record from the last days of operation, but nobody has confirmed what it says.