Scattered Desks

The safety offices occupy a room on an upper floor of the main building at Ikeshima Coal Mine, and in 2026 they look largely as they were left. Papers and debris cover the desks. A large dark monitor sits on a desk to the right of centre. A tall white air conditioning unit stands beside the rear windows, next to a dark wooden desk with a low partition. Horizontal blinds on the two large windows slice the room into hard bands of light and shadow. Overhead, electrical conduits hang loose from a ceiling that has been giving way to water for years, the damage most visible above the left window. Ikeshima Coal Mine operated on and beneath a small island in Nagasaki Prefecture, about 7 km off the west coast of the Nishi-Sonogi Peninsula in the Gotō Sea. The island itself covers about 1.08 km²; the worked coalfield lay entirely under the seabed, the deepest workings reaching about 650 m below sea level. Commercial output began in 1959, making Ikeshima the last new coal mine to open in Japan, and the mine produced approximately 44.5 million tonnes of clean coal over its operating life. At its 1970 peak, around 7,770 people lived on the island, housed in reinforced-concrete apartment blocks because there was no room to spread. To supply them, Matsushima Coal Mining commissioned an on-island coal-fired power station and a seawater-desalination plant in 1967. The mine produced more than 1.5 million tonnes of coal in its peak year of 1985, and maintained output of around 1.2 million tonnes a year into the 1990s. The end came on 29 November 2001. The last descent was made the day before; about 2,500 employees were dismissed. A closure ceremony followed on 23 March 2002. The offices, the desks, the papers, the monitor: what the photograph records is what the closure left behind.