Rusted Operator Desk

The winding house control room at Ikeshima Coal Mine still holds most of what the last shift left behind. Five CRT monitors are stacked on a metal shelf above the main control desk, four in a row with a fifth balanced on top. A black rotary telephone with a coiled cord sits on the desk among scattered debris. A five-wheeled office chair stands in the lower right, still facing the console. Bright daylight falls through a large window fitted with horizontal blinds, a diagonal metal beam crossing the glass. A blue metal box with a yellow label sits in the left foreground. Rust and peeling paint run across the panels, one still marked OLD and CED. Ikeshima Coal Mine was developed from 1951 to 1952 on a small island roughly 7 km off the Nishi-Sonogi Peninsula in Nagasaki Prefecture, operated by Matsushima Coal Mining Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of what is now Mitsui Matsushima Holdings. Offshore boring from 1948 had confirmed the seams; commercial output began in 1959, making Ikeshima the last new colliery to open in Japan. The entire worked area lay beneath the seabed, with the deepest workings reaching about 650 m below sea level. The first vertical shaft was completed in 1967, the second in 1981. Peak production came in 1985, when more than 1.5 million tonnes of coal were raised. The mine closed on 29 November 2001, after 42 years of production, with about 2,500 employees dismissed. Approximately 44.54 million tonnes of clean coal had been raised across the mine's operating life. The control room in this photograph recorded conditions and coordinated operations across that span. The monitors, the telephone, the chair: all remained where the last shift left them. What was once the operational nerve of Japan's last large-scale colliery now sits under rust and peeling paint, daylight coming in through the blinds.