Headframe Winding Wheels

The two winding wheels of the Ikeshima Coal Mine headframe ride above the island's vegetation, their spoked profiles set against a sky going warm at the end of the day. Rust has worked through the steel lattice from the frame's joints outward. Foliage has taken the lower structure entirely, leaving only the upper steelwork and the wheels reading clearly above the trees. A corrugated metal building sits off to one side, utility poles and power lines threaded past it. The surface plant and the sea are close together on Ikeshima, because everything operational had to fit on an island of about 1.08 square kilometres while the coal itself lay entirely beneath the seabed. Matsushima Coal Mining began boring offshore in 1948 and confirmed the seams under and around the island. Mine development followed in the early 1950s, coal was reached in 1955, and commercial output began in 1959. Ikeshima was the last new coal mine to open in Japan. The workings reached seams as deep as 650 metres below sea level, with a second working zone developed from 1974 around the islet of Hikishima, about 4 to 5 kilometres to the west. By the 1990s the underground roadways totalled about 96 kilometres and the lease covered about 35,500 hectares. The mine's two vertical shafts, the first completed in 1967 and the second in 1981, brought miners down to the working levels; the winding wheels visible here are part of that surface infrastructure. The island's population reached 7,770 at the 1970 peak, housed in reinforced-concrete apartment towers because the island had no room to spread. Output peaked in 1985 at more than 1.5 million tonnes. The mine continued through the policy shifts of the late 1980s and the electricity-market liberalisation of 1998 before closing on 29 November 2001, the last large-scale coal mine in the country. Approximately 44.5 million tonnes of clean coal had been raised across the mine's working life. The headframe remains, the wheels in place, the frame still standing above the overgrowth of an island that now holds a resident population of 111.