Dangling Cable Corridor

This corridor sits inside the surface plant of Ikeshima Coal Mine, on the small island of Ikeshima roughly 7 kilometres off the Nishi-Sonogi Peninsula in the Gotō Sea, Nagasaki Prefecture. A dense bundle of thick black cables hangs from the exposed ceiling frame and runs the full length of the passage, drawing the eye toward a pair of teal double doors corroded along their edges. A light-grey electrical enclosure braced by three rusting horizontal bars stands to one side. Two ribbed, light-coloured transformers are ranged along the opposite wall. Those transformers fed the winding gear positioned above this level. From the gear, a steel wire rope descended the shaft into a coalfield that lay entirely beneath the seabed. The deepest workings reached around 650 metres below sea level, and by the 1990s the underground roadways totalled about 96 kilometres. The coal extracted was a weakly-caking coking-blend raw material, low in sulphur at between 0.5 and 1.5 percent, with a calorific value of about 7,500 kcal/kg. Matsushima Coal Mining Co., Ltd. developed Ikeshima from around 1952, reaching coal in September 1955 and beginning commercial output in 1959, making it the last new coal mine to open in Japan. Production peaked in 1985 at more than 1.5 million tonnes. The mine closed on 29 November 2001, the last large-scale underground colliery in the country, with approximately 44.54 million tonnes of clean coal raised across its operational life. The surface plant now stands largely disused. The corridor, the transformers, the cables, and the doors at the end of them remain as the winding gear left them when the final shift came up.