Collapsed Ceiling Ruin

One of the offices in the coal mining building on Ikeshima sits at the edge of the sea, windows on two walls opening onto the water and a balcony railing beyond the left-hand glazing. The suspended ceiling has given way: a large rectangular section is gone entirely, the dark cavity above it now open to the room, and the metal grid hangs loose across the centre. White plaster debris lies heaped across the concrete floor beneath. The right-hand window has lost a pane, leaving a jagged gap in the glazing. A white-topped table with wooden legs stands in the far left foreground, the kind of furniture that simply stayed when everyone left. Ikeshima Coal Mine operated from 1959 until 29 November 2001, a run of 42 years that made it the last large-scale coal mine in Japan. The island sits about 7 km off the Nishi-Sonogi Peninsula in Nagasaki Prefecture, and the entire coalfield lay beneath the seabed, reaching depths of around 650 metres below sea level. At the mine's 1970 peak, 7,770 people lived on an island of about 1.08 km², housed in reinforced-concrete apartment towers the company built because there was no room to spread. By the time the final shift came up on 28 November 2001, about 2,500 employees were dismissed at closure. The surface buildings, offices among them, have been disused since. What this photograph records is the particular quality of a room that faces the sea on two sides and has since been undone from the inside out: the ceiling first, then the glass, then the slow accumulation of debris across a floor that once held people at work. The office remains standing. The view has not changed.