Walker on Curve

Yu moves away up the road, his long shadow thrown forward across sun-warmed asphalt, the island opening around him. A concrete barrier runs along the left side of the curve; a metal guardrail, patched and rusted, lines the right, where yellow-green scrub crowds close to the rail. Power lines cross the tree line above as the road bends out of sight. Ikeshima sits about 7 km off the Nishi-Sonogi Peninsula in Nagasaki Prefecture, an island of roughly 1.08 km² and about 4 km around. Its name comes from Kagamigaike, a pond that was filled to build the harbour in 1958. The island held a peak population of 7,770 in 1970, housed in reinforced-concrete apartment towers built because the island had no room to spread. The mine beneath it, entirely undersea, worked seams down to about 650 m below sea level and produced approximately 44.5 million tonnes of clean coal between 1959 and its closure on 29 November 2001. Ikeshima was the last new coal mine to open in Japan and, when it shut, the last large-scale coal mine operating in the country. Most of the roughly 2,500 workers dismissed at closure left the island. The population stood at 111 as of 2021. The housing blocks and the shopping street remain largely abandoned. The road in this photograph still runs its full circuit of the island, the scrub growing back to the edges, the power lines still strung above the tree line, the guardrail rusting quietly at the roadside.