Hoist Hall Floor

The hoist floor at Ikeshima Coal Mine sits near the water's edge, part of the surface plant packed onto an island barely a kilometre square while the coal itself lay entirely beneath the seabed. The large sheave wheel and its drum are still in place above rusting gear, dark chains hanging vertically through the foreground. To the right, a light blue cylindrical vessel with circular openings stands ringed at its base by bright yellow safety railing. Three rectangular windows along the far wall let in flat, diffused light. This is the machinery that connected the surface to everything below it. Matsushima Coal Mining began developing Ikeshima in the early 1950s after offshore boring in 1948 confirmed the seams. The mine reached coal in 1955 and began commercial output in 1959, the last new colliery to open in Japan. Two vertical shafts were eventually sunk: the first completed in 1967, the second in 1981. By the 1990s the underground roadways totalled about 96 km, reaching worked faces at around 650 m below sea level, with a second working area developed from 1974 off the islet of Hikishima, about 4 to 5 km west. The mine's peak production year was 1985, when more than 1.5 million tonnes of coal were raised. The coal was a weakly-caking, low-sulphur coking-blend material, valued for its blendability and its calorific value of about 7,500 kcal/kg. J-POWER's Matsushima coal-fired Power Station, commissioned in 1981, used large quantities of Ikeshima coal until the mine's closure. That closure came on 29 November 2001, after about 42 years of production and a lifetime output of approximately 44.5 million tonnes of clean coal. About 2,500 employees were dismissed. The surface plant photographed here in 2026 is what remains of the operation that once sustained an island population of 7,770 at its 1970 peak. The hoist wheel no longer turns.