Concrete Block Facade

On a 1.08 km² island in the Gotō Sea off Nagasaki, there was no room to build outward. When Matsushima Coal Mining established its workforce community on Ikeshima, it built upward instead, stacking reinforced-concrete apartment blocks where mainland coal towns would have stretched out in low timber rows. The result was a dense, engineered settlement on a rock barely four kilometres around. This block is one of those towers. Dense green and yellow-leafed growth swallows its lower half entirely, a thick column of dried vines wound tight around the central pillar and green ivy draped across the left face. Above the growth line, five storeys of balconies and railings show through, the concrete spalling and discoloured, the central support beam lighter and more weathered than the sections beside it. Matsushima Coal Mining began developing Ikeshima in 1952, reached coal in 1955, and started commercial output in 1959, making it the last new coal mine to open in Japan. At its 1970 peak the island held 7,770 people, all served by communal bathhouses and shared laundry facilities, an on-island coal-fired power station, and a seawater-desalination plant commissioned in 1967, because a remote island in the Gotō Sea could not be supplied with mains power and water in the ordinary way. The mine produced more than 1.5 million tonnes of coal in its peak year of 1985 and continued at around 1.2 million tonnes a year into the 1990s. It closed on 29 November 2001, with approximately 2,500 workers dismissed. Most residents left. By 2021, 111 people remained on the island, mostly retired miners and their relatives. The apartment blocks remain. What the photograph records is the growth taking the lower storeys back, unhurried, while the concrete above it holds its form against the sea air.