Headframe Double Exposure

The steel headframe of Ikeshima Coal Mine stands at the water's edge, its spoked winding wheels the most visible marker of everything that lay beneath the seabed. In this photograph, those wheels appear twice, stacked one behind the other across the frame, the result of film that did not advance between exposures. The rendered engine house below them holds its shape across both layers, its two lower windows catching the light. Dense foliage blurs across the foreground. A corrugated metal structure sits to the right of the headframe, and a fainter industrial outline ghosts the far right edge. Geometric patterns drift across the blue sky above. The surface works of a submarine colliery, collapsed into a single crowded plane. Ikeshima Coal Mine began commercial output in 1959, the last new colliery opened in Japan, and worked on until 29 November 2001 as the last large-scale coal mine in the country. The entire worked area lay beneath the seabed, the deepest faces reaching about 650 metres below sea level, with a second working zone developed around the islet of Hikishima from 1974. Two vertical shafts served the mine: the first completed in 1967, the second in 1981. The headframe and hoist house visible here were the surface end of that system, the point where coal wound up from the undersea workings. The mine produced approximately 44.5 million tonnes of clean coal over roughly 50 years of development, with peak annual output exceeding 1.5 million tonnes in 1985. About 2,500 workers were dismissed when it closed. The photograph was made in 2026, when the island's coal-mine experience tour was still operating but the city had already passed an ordinance abolishing the facility at the end of FY2026.