Washery and Stack

Ikeshima's isolation shaped every decision made about the island. When the first vertical shaft was completed in 1967, the operators at Matsushima Coal Mining understood that a remote island in the Gotō Sea could not be supplied with mains power or fresh water in the ordinary way. The solution was to build both on the island: a coal-fired power station and a seawater-desalination plant, commissioned together to keep the mine and its community running independently of the mainland. The power station's chimney still rises above the boiler house, its white render discoloured and worn toward the top. A dense field of feathery, light-coloured grasses runs up to a dark unpaved path, half-concealing the lower buildings and an overhead run of pipes. A section of conveyor structure, collapsed and part-dismantled, leads back into the main concrete block, where small rectangular windows with yellowed panes line the lower wall. Vegetation has taken hold across the upper levels of the plant, pushing into gaps in the structure that once handled the coal drawn from seams far beneath the seabed. Ikeshima Coal Mine was the last new colliery sunk in Japan, beginning commercial output in 1959 and working on as the last large-scale coal mine in the country until closure on 29 November 2001. At its 1970 peak, the island carried a population of 7,770, housed in reinforced-concrete apartment towers and served by the self-contained infrastructure that the power station was built to anchor. Peak production came in 1985, when more than 1.5 million tonnes of coal were raised from seams reaching about 650 metres below sea level. The mine dismissed around 2,500 employees on the day it closed. What the photograph records is the surface plant as it stands now: the chimney holding its position above the boiler house, the grasses advancing, the conveyors giving way. The underground continued for a time after closure as a training facility and later a tourist attraction, but the surface has been returning to the island at its own pace since 2001.