Cat on Wall

A grey tabby sits on a low concrete block wall on Ikeshima, yellow-green eyes half-lidded and fixed on the camera. A faint white swirl marks its back. The foliage behind it falls out of focus, dense and green against the pale aggregate of the wall. The concrete is the same material that built this island's housing stock: reinforced high-rise apartment blocks, stacked close together because there was nowhere else for them to go. At the 1970 peak, nearly 7,800 people lived on an island barely a kilometre square in the Gotō Sea off Nagasaki. The company that ran the Ikeshima Coal Mine built the towers, the bathhouses, the desalination plant, the on-island power station. It built an entire town on a rock because the coal was underneath it. The mine opened commercially in 1959, the last new colliery sunk in Japan, and worked until 29 November 2001, when it closed as the last large-scale coal mine in the country. About 2,500 workers were dismissed at closure. Most residents followed them off the island. The population stood at 111 in 2021, mostly retired miners and their families. Much of the apartment stock and the shopping street stands disused. The cats stayed. Ikeshima's free-roaming population of them is one of the more noted features of the island now, a current-state fact rather than a heritage one. This tabby is photographed in 2026, on a wall built for a community of thousands, surrounded by the foliage that has had time to grow.