Stool

A single timber stool sits in the middle of one of the working rooms at Shimizusawa Thermal Power Plant, the seat scuffed and worn to bare wood at the centre, the legs splayed slightly from decades of use. The stool is hardwood, dark-stained, the kind of utility seat that was standard in Japanese industrial workspaces through most of the twentieth century. The room around the stool is concrete-floored, with the standard industrial green walls of the plant. The stool sits where the last operator left it, slightly turned, in front of a wall-mounted panel that no longer has its instruments. The light comes through a small high window across the room.

Stools of this kind were the working seat of operators across the plant's monitoring stations. Each operator on shift had a station to watch and a stool to sit on, with the stools moved between stations as the duty rotation required. The Shimizusawa plant ran for sixty-four years from 1926 to 1990. The stool in this photograph sat in this room for some portion of those years. After operations ended in 1990 the stool was left where it was. Smaller items like this were not worth removing during decommissioning, and the larger pieces of plant that came out of the building usually had to be cut out of the walls rather than carried out through doors.