Overgrown Apartment Block

Ikeshima is a small island, roughly 1.08 km² and about 4 km around, sitting in the Gotō Sea off the Nishi-Sonogi Peninsula in Nagasaki Prefecture. The coalfield beneath it and the surrounding seabed was the last large-scale undersea coal mine in Japan. The mine closed on 29 November 2001. The apartment blocks on the island exist because there was nowhere else to put people. Mainland coal towns spread out in low timber rows across available ground. Ikeshima had no available ground, so Matsushima Coal Mining built upward in reinforced concrete. The blocks came with communal bathhouses and shared laundry facilities. In the years before closure, rent was about 400 yen. At the island's population peak in 1970, 7,770 people lived here. The block in this photograph is one of several still standing across the island. Ivy has covered most of the facade, the dark green mat climbing past rows of rectangular windows, some still glazed and some boarded. Seen from near the base, the wall rises steeply. Bare branches of two large trees cross the upper frame against a pale sky. When the mine closed, about 2,500 workers were dismissed on the same day. Most of the island's residents left. The population had fallen to 111 by 2021, mostly retired miners and their relatives, living among housing blocks and a shopping street that stand largely unoccupied. Commercial coal production at Ikeshima Coal Mine ran from 1959 to 2001, roughly 42 years of output, with the mine raising more than 1.5 million tonnes in its peak year of 1985. The operator's successor records approximately 44.54 million tonnes of clean coal across the life of the operation. The concrete the workers lived in outlasted all of it.