Crosswalk and Booth

White crosswalk bars run in two sets across the asphalt and into the dark of a tunnel portal cut under an overgrown hill. To the left, a small white guard booth stands half-hidden by trees beside a pedestrian crossing sign, a blue figure on a white triangle. On the right hillside a rusted lattice tower carries an exposed wheel-like mechanism, and on the distant ridge two wind turbines break the treeline. The road keeps going into the hill long after the light drops away. This infrastructure sits on Ikeshima, an island of about 1.08 km² in the Gotō Sea, roughly 7 km off the Nishi-Sonogi Peninsula in Nagasaki City. The island takes its name from a former pond, Kagamigaike, which was filled to build the harbour in 1958. Everything the mine needed had to fit on that ground: the two vertical shafts, the headframe, hoist, washery and conveyors, the coal-fired power station and seawater-desalination plant commissioned in 1967, and the reinforced-concrete apartment towers that housed a population which reached about 7,770 at its 1970 peak. The coal itself was never here. The entire worked field lay beneath the seabed, the deepest workings reaching about 650 m below sea level, extending out to a second working area around the islet of Hikishima about 4 to 5 km to the west, developed from 1974. Offshore boring in 1948 had confirmed the seams; development began in 1951 to 1952 and commercial output ran from 1959. Ikeshima was the last new coal mine to open in Japan, and it ran as the country's last large-scale coal mine until 29 November 2001, when about 2,500 employees were dismissed at closure. By 2026, when this photograph was made, the resident population had fallen to around 111. The surface plant, the apartment blocks, and this road through the hill remained.