Abandoned Classroom

The room sits in the basement of the main mining building on Ikeshima, a small island of about 1.08 km² in the Gotō Sea, roughly 7 km off the Nishi-Sonogi Peninsula in Nagasaki Prefecture. A long workbench occupies the wall beneath three colourful pictures still taped in place. Wires and small objects lie across the bench's surface, undisturbed. Hard window light from the left reaches into the interior, throwing the bench into relief against the dark of the room behind it. Green foliage crowds the glass from outside. A white tripod stands lit by a distant source toward the back of the space, and the exposed ceiling beams above are furred with debris. Papers remain tacked to a column at right. The Ikeshima Coal Mine was the last new colliery sunk in Japan, beginning commercial output in 1959, and it operated continuously for 42 years as the last large-scale coal mine in the country. The worked coalfield lay entirely beneath the seabed, with the deepest levels reaching about 650 metres below sea level. By the 1990s the underground roadways totalled about 96 km and the mining lease covered about 35,500 hectares. Lifetime output reached approximately 44.5 million tonnes of clean coal. The mine closed on 29 November 2001, with about 2,500 workers dismissed at closure. After closure, the site was repurposed as the Nagasaki Coal Technology Centre and later opened as an underground experience facility, running tours with former miners as guides. That programme, which started in 2003, is scheduled to close at the end of FY2026 following a Nagasaki City ordinance passed in September 2025. The housing and mine plant still stand across the island, the underground can still be entered, and a resident population of 111 remained as of 2021. The photograph records the basement room in 2026, the objects on the bench in the same positions the last person left them.