Island at Dusk

Seen from the ferry crossing the Gotō Sea, Ikeshima offers almost nothing to the eye at dusk: a low dark ridge, a smudge of low-rise structures along the waterline, a small bright glint on the chop. The settlement and surface plant are packed onto barely more than 1 square kilometre of land. The scale of what lies beneath it is not legible from the water at all. The coalfield that made the island ran entirely under the seabed, worked through two vertical shafts down to about 650 metres below sea level. The first shaft was completed in 1967 alongside an on-island coal-fired power station and a seawater-desalination plant, both necessary because a remote island could not draw from the mainland grid or water supply in the ordinary way. The second shaft followed in 1981. By the 1990s the underground roadways totalled about 96 kilometres and the lease covered around 35,500 hectares, a very large field for an island a little over 4 kilometres around. Matsushima Coal Mining began offshore boring in 1948 and confirmed the seams beneath the island. Mine development followed from the early 1950s; commercial output began in 1959, making Ikeshima the last new coal mine to open in Japan. The coal was a weakly-caking coking-blend grade, low in sulphur at between 0.5 and 1.5 percent, with a calorific value of about 7,500 kcal/kg. Peak production came in 1985, when more than 1.5 million tonnes were raised. The mine's workforce reached 1,451 regular workers in fiscal year 1976. The mine closed on 29 November 2001, the last large-scale coal mine in the country. About 2,500 employees were dismissed. The island population, which had reached a peak of 7,770 in 1970, had already been falling for decades; by 2021 it stood at 111. This photograph was made in 2026, from the ferry heading back toward the mainland at the end of the day. The contrail above the island and the light on the water will be gone in minutes. The island will remain as it appears here: small, dark, improbably self-contained.