Cats on Pavement

Seven cats hold the concrete path outside one of the reinforced-concrete apartment blocks that once housed the workforce of Ikeshima Coal Mine. The building behind them is cream-rendered, its facade still carrying blue metal railings, exposed pipework and rows of utility meters from its operational years. A silver car edges into the right of the frame. Near a ground-floor doorway on the left, a small blue bucket and a black hose rest where someone left them. Ikeshima is a small island, roughly 1.08 square kilometres and about 4 kilometres around, sitting some 7 kilometres off the Nishi-Sonogi Peninsula in the Gotō Sea off Nagasaki. Because it had almost no room to spread, Matsushima Coal Mining Co. built upward in reinforced concrete rather than outward in the low timber rows typical of mainland coal towns. The blocks came with communal bathhouses and shared laundry facilities. By 1970, when the Ōshima mine on the mainland closed and the operation concentrated entirely on Ikeshima, the island's population reached a peak of 7,770. Commercial coal production began in 1959, making Ikeshima the last new colliery to open in Japan. The mine worked an entirely submarine coalfield, with the deepest faces reaching about 650 metres below sea level and the principal working area extending to the islet of Hikishima, about 4 to 5 kilometres to the west, from 1974. The mine closed on 29 November 2001, its roughly 2,500 workers dismissed. The population fell away sharply after that; by 2021, 111 people remained on the island, mostly retired miners and their families. The apartment blocks stand largely as they were. The cats have moved in where the families moved out.