Glass Door Interior

The corridor runs the length of the safety offices inside the main mine building on Ikeshima, its floor bare and unlit, green paint lifting from the right-hand wall in wide flakes. At the far end a large window frames nothing but overgrown vegetation and a hazy sky burning through dirty glass and lifting frames. A light fixture still hangs from the ceiling. In the left corner a staircase rises, throwing a diagonal shadow across the wall. The building is quiet in a way that takes a moment to place. Ikeshima Coal Mine opened for commercial production in 1959, the last new colliery to be sunk in Japan. The island sits about 7 km off the Nishi-Sonogi Peninsula in the Gotō Sea, roughly 1.08 km² in area, and at its 1970 peak it held a population of 7,770 people. Because there was no room to spread, the company built reinforced-concrete apartment towers rather than the low timber rows of mainland coal towns, and commissioned an on-island coal-fired power station and a seawater-desalination plant in 1967 to keep the whole settlement running in isolation from the mainland grid. The mine worked an entirely undersea field, its deepest faces reaching about 650 m below sea level, with underground roadways eventually totalling about 96 km. Peak production came in 1985, when more than 1.5 million tonnes of coal were raised. The operator's successor records approximately 44.54 million tonnes of clean coal extracted over the life of the mine. The Ikeshima Coal Mine closed on 29 November 2001, the last large-scale underground colliery in Kyushu, after 42 years of production. About 2,500 workers were dismissed. Most residents left. By 2021, 111 people remained on the island, mostly retired miners and their families. The safety offices, the apartments, the shopping street all stand largely as they were left. The vegetation at the window keeps growing.