Window and Vines

The main mining office on Ikeshima stands open to the elements, its wide window frame rusted and empty. Cracked and peeling white plaster covers the left wall; further along, the surface has given way entirely to bare concrete. Dark green vines with broad leaves have pushed in through the right side of the frame, trailing over the rusted metal. Outside, tall pale grass grows close to the opening, and beyond it the sea sits clear under open sky. The office served the Ikeshima Coal Mine, an undersea colliery that worked the seams beneath the Gotō Sea from the start of commercial output in 1959 until its closure on 29 November 2001. The mine was the last new colliery to open in Japan and, at its closure, the last large-scale coal mine operating in the country. The entire worked field lay beneath the seabed, with the deepest workings reaching about 650 metres below sea level. A second working area was later developed around the islet of Hikishima, about 4 to 5 kilometres to the west, from 1974. By the 1990s the underground roadways stretched to about 96 kilometres in total. Peak production came in 1985, when more than 1.5 million tonnes of coal was raised in a single year. The mine produced approximately 44.5 million tonnes of clean coal across its operating life. At closure, about 2,500 employees were dismissed. Most of the island's residents left in the years that followed; the population had peaked at 7,770 in 1970. What the photograph records in 2026 is the office returned to the island. The vines are doing what vines do with an opening in a wall. The sea that sits beyond the sill is the same sea the coal came up from, for 42 years, before the last shift came up and the mine went quiet.