Chimney and Plant

The on-island coal-fired power station on Ikeshima was not incidental infrastructure. It was the reason the mine could function at all. Ikeshima sits roughly 7 km off the west coast of the Nishi-Sonogi Peninsula in Nagasaki Prefecture, far enough from the mainland grid that mains power was never a practical option. When the first vertical shaft was completed in 1967, the power station and a seawater-desalination plant were commissioned alongside it, giving Ikeshima Coal Mine an unusual degree of industrial self-sufficiency. What the photograph records is the boiler house of that station at dusk: a multi-level structure whose external pipework and steel walkways are picked out in silhouette against a haze-lit sunset sky. The chimney stands at the right of the frame, tall and blue-grey against the fading light. A large curved pipe sweeps in from the upper left, and skeletal steelwork crowns the roof of the main structure. On the left, a forested hillside catches the last orange light of the day, and power lines cross the mid-ground toward the bright sky beyond. The mine the power station served was the last new colliery to open in Japan, with commercial output beginning in 1959. At its 1970 peak, the island's population reached 7,770, housed in reinforced-concrete apartment blocks because the island had no room for the low timber rows of a mainland coal town. The mine raised more than 1.5 million tonnes of coal in its peak year of 1985, and continued producing around 1.2 million tonnes annually into the 1990s. Total lifetime output reached approximately 44.5 million tonnes of clean coal. The operation closed on 29 November 2001, with about 2,500 employees dismissed. The boiler house and chimney remain. At the end of a clear day, the structure holds its shape against the sky above the island's western ridge, the pipework and walkways still legible, the chimney unchanged in outline from the years when the mine below was still working seams 650 metres beneath the seabed.