Coastal Mirror Pole

At the edge of Ikeshima's seawall, a convex traffic mirror sits on a white pole. Its frame has rusted to a solid orange rim and the upper edge has broken away. Red characters on the pole read 注意, caution. The curved glass still holds a reflection: a road surface, a textured wall, a compressed version of the world behind whoever stands at the water's edge. A vertical crack runs through the concrete barrier below the mirror, and beyond it the water lies flat and blue out to a line of mountains faint under pale grey sky. Ikeshima is a small island, about 1.08 km² and roughly 4 km around, sitting in the Gotō Sea off the Sotome district of Nagasaki. The community that once filled it was built around an undersea coal mine, and the entire worked field lay not beneath the island but beneath the seabed surrounding it, reaching depths of about 650 m below sea level. At the 1970 peak, 7,770 people lived here, housed in reinforced-concrete apartment towers the company built because the island had no room for the low timber rows common to mainland coal towns. Matsushima Coal Mining began offshore boring in 1948, confirmed the seams, and reached coal by September 1955. Commercial output began in 1959, making Ikeshima the last new coal mine to open in Japan. Production continued for 42 years. The mine closed on 29 November 2001, its last large-scale undersea seams exhausted of economic argument if not of coal, and about 2,500 workers were dismissed. The peak production year had been 1985, with more than 1.5 million tonnes raised. What this photograph records is the waterfront edge of what remains: a piece of safety infrastructure, cracked concrete, open water. The mountains across the channel are on the Nishi-Sonogi Peninsula, the mainland the island was always separate from. The mirror's reflection is small and curved and still working.