Looking Down

Looking down through one of the working levels at Ashio Copper Mine, the floor of the next level below is visible through a steel grating walkway. Below the grating, machinery, pipework, and cabling sit on the lower floor in the standard mineral-processing-plant layout: a row of cells along one side, a conveyor running between them, the walls clad in steel sheet patched in places. Through the openings between the grating bars, the ore-residue staining on the lower floor is visible. The light falls from a window two levels above, narrowing through the structural openings to reach the lower floor as a thin shaft.

Looking-down views in a plant like this one show how the processing stages stacked vertically inside the building. Ashio was built into the mountainside specifically so gravity could carry the ore through the stages: the mine head at the top, the crushers below, the mills below them, the flotation cells, the refinery, and the dispatch at the bottom. The plant operated from the Furukawa modernisation of 1877 through to the Excavation Department's 1973 closure. The vertical stacking has stood as photographed since, with the working machinery on each level largely as it was on the day of final shutdown.