Plant and Chimney

The light blue-capped chimney rises above the boiler house of the Ikeshima power station, the tallest point on the right of the frame. An asphalt road curves in from the foreground, a small white-railed bridge crossing a culvert on the left before the road reaches the cluster of white-painted buildings. One building is studded with rows of small square windows. Utility poles and their tangle of wiring run overhead, and dense dark green foliage climbs the steep hillside behind the complex. Dry golden grasses line the roadside. The power station was commissioned in 1967, the same year the first vertical shaft was completed at Ikeshima Coal Mine. Both were necessary consequences of geography. The island sits roughly 7 km off the Nishi-Sonogi Peninsula in the Gotō Sea, with no connection to mainland power grids or water infrastructure. Rather than pipe in what the population needed, the operator, Matsushima Coal Mining Co., built the means of supply on the island itself: a coal-fired power station and a seawater-desalination plant, running together from 1967 onward. By 1970 the island held a peak population of 7,770, housed in reinforced-concrete apartment towers because an island barely a kilometre across had nowhere to spread. The mine worked on through 1985, its peak production year with more than 1.5 million tonnes of coal raised, and into the 1990s at around 1.2 million tonnes a year. The entire worked field lay beneath the seabed, with the deepest workings reaching about 650 m below sea level. The Ikeshima Coal Mine closed on 29 November 2001, the last large-scale coal mine in Japan to operate. The power station's chimney has outlasted the mine it was built to serve, still standing above the road and the bridge and the tangle of overhead wiring, against a hillside that has grown back thick and dark around what remains.