Safety Briefing Room

The safety offices of the main mining building at Ikeshima Coal Mine held the briefing room where workers gathered before each shift. Long narrow wooden tables with attached bench seating run in rows toward two dark green chalkboards at the far wall, one still carrying faint chalk markings. A rotary telephone sits on one of the midground tables. Ceiling fans hang from exposed wiring above, and a column in the right foreground stands with its white paint lifting away in wide flakes. On the rear wall, a large sign carries two lines of Japanese text: 「点検と確認」, "inspection and confirmation", and below it, あとでよりいまが大切, roughly "now matters more than later". The room collected dust after the mine closed on 29 November 2001, the final descent having taken place the day before. Ikeshima Coal Mine operated beneath the seabed off the island of Ikeshima, about 7 km from the Nishi-Sonogi Peninsula in Nagasaki Prefecture. Commercial production began in 1959, making it the last new coal mine to open in Japan, and the mine worked for approximately 42 years. The entire field lay below the seabed, reaching working depths of around 650 m below sea level. By the 1990s the underground roadways totalled about 96 km. Output peaked in 1985 at more than 1.5 million tonnes, and the mine produced approximately 1.2 million tonnes a year through much of the 1980s and into the 1990s. The coal was a weakly-caking coking-blend raw material with low sulphur content, valued by nearby industry and power generators. At closure, about 2,500 workers were dismissed. The briefing room sits exactly as the photograph found it in 2026, the chalkboard markings still legible, the telephone still in place on the table, the sign still facing rows of empty benches.