Overgrown Courtyard

Two reinforced-concrete apartment blocks rise above a dense stand of pampas and miscanthus in this 2026 photograph. The grasses have reached the lower floors; a large rectangular opening breaks the third storey of the nearer block and several windows around it have lost their panes, the interiors gone to shadow. Ivy holds the further building under a pale, near-white sky. These towers were company housing, built by Matsushima Coal Mining to solve a problem that mainland coal towns never faced. Ikeshima covers about 1.08 square kilometres, roughly 4 kilometres around, sitting about 7 kilometres off the Nishi-Sonogi Peninsula in the Gotō Sea. There was no room for the low timber rows that spread across pit towns on the mainland. The company built upward instead, fitting communal bathhouses and shared laundries into each block. Rent just before closure was about 400 yen. Commercial coal production began at Ikeshima in 1959, making it the last new colliery to open in Japan. The population climbed steadily as the undersea workings expanded, reaching a peak of around 7,770 people in 1970. The mine produced over 1.5 million tonnes of coal in its peak year of 1985, and maintained around 1.2 million tonnes a year through into the 1990s. The entire worked field lay beneath the seabed, descending to about 650 metres below sea level. Ikeshima Coal Mine closed on 29 November 2001. Most residents left; by 2021, the island's population stood at 111, mostly retired miners and their families. The apartment blocks, the shopping street, and much of the settlement's fabric have been disused since the closure. What the photograph shows is what the island's housing has become in the years since: concrete and glass giving way, by degrees, to the grasses and the climbing plants that answer to no one.