Stairway and Block

The steps in this photograph connect the main mining building at Ikeshima Coal Mine to the residential quarter above, a route the island's workforce would have used every day across four decades of production. Concrete construction, white-painted edges on each tread, two retaining walls channelling the climb: the left wall has gone entirely under dark ivy, while the right remains open to a clear sky where power lines run overhead. Brown autumn leaves lie across the lower steps. A white sign frame hangs above the base of the stairway, its Japanese characters worn past reading. Ikeshima Coal Mine opened for commercial output in 1959 as the last new colliery to be sunk in Japan, operating beneath the seabed off the Nishi-Sonogi Peninsula in Nagasaki Prefecture. The island of Ikeshima, about 1.08 km² and roughly 4 km around, held almost everything the operation needed: surface shafts, a washery, a coal-fired power station, a seawater-desalination plant, and reinforced-concrete apartment blocks that housed a peak population of around 7,770 in 1970. Mainland coal towns spread out in low timber rows; Ikeshima, with no room to spread, went up in concrete. The mine's operator, Matsushima Coal Mining Co., raised weakly-caking coking-blend coal of about 7,500 kcal/kg from seams reaching about 650 m below sea level. A second working area was developed from 1974 around the islet of Hikishima, about 4 to 5 km to the west, accessed by a ventilation shaft 720 m deep. By the 1990s the underground roadways totalled about 96 km. Peak production, in 1985, exceeded 1.5 million tonnes. The mine closed on 29 November 2001, after 42 years of production and a lifetime output of approximately 44.5 million tonnes of clean coal. About 2,500 employees were dismissed. The stairway, the sign frame and the ivy are what 2026 finds in their place.