Former Shime Mining Company Shaft Tower

A Concrete Tower Built to Pull Coal Out of the Ground

On a low rise in Shime, just east of Fukuoka, a single grey tower rises 47.6 meters above the surrounding houses and parks. The Former Shime Mining Office Vertical Shaft Headframe is a reinforced concrete structure, eight storeys above ground with a basement below, finished in bare exposed concrete that has weathered to a soft, mottled grey. It was completed on 10 May 1943, in the middle of the Second World War, and for two decades it lifted coal and miners out of a shaft that drops 430 meters straight down beneath it.

Its silhouette is unusual. The broad block at the top, where the hoisting machinery sat, gives the tower the look of a hammer stood on its handle. This shape has a name in mining engineering: a tower-mounted winding headframe, sometimes called a winding tower. The hoist that raised and lowered the cages was placed at the very top rather than in a separate engine house at ground level, and that arrangement is what gives the building its height and its blunt, top-heavy profile.

Coal for the Imperial Navy

The Shime coalfield was tied to the military long before this tower existed. The area was set aside as a naval reserve colliery in 1888, supplying coal for warships and for the navy's own arsenals. Mining moved into the Shime district itself from around 1906, and over the following decades the operation passed through a series of naval bodies.

By the early 1940s the mine was run by the Fourth Naval Fuel Depot, and it was this organization's mining section that planned and designed the headframe. Work began in 1941 and the tower was finished in 1943. The engineer behind it, Inomata Noboru, had travelled in Europe and studied the hammer-head winding towers being built in Germany; he also looked at a related shaft in Fushun, in what is now northeastern China, before settling on reinforced concrete for the Shime structure.

After the war the colliery left navy hands. It was managed for a time by the Ministry of Transport and then, from 1949, by Japanese National Railways, which needed coal to fuel its steam locomotives. Output peaked in 1957 at more than 210,000 tons in a single year. As the country shifted from coal to oil the mine became unprofitable, and it closed in 1964. The shaft itself was sealed in 1966.

Why It Became an Important Cultural Property

Japan once had hundreds of mine shafts, and many carried headframes of one kind or another. Very few of those structures survive, and almost none of the tower-winding type. The Shime headframe is the only example of this fully developed form built in Japan's modern industrial era that still stands. That alone made it worth protecting.

There is a second reason. At 47.6 meters it is one of the tallest reinforced concrete structures of its period in Japan, and it shows what Japanese builders could do with the material in the 1940s. The country was awarding it recognition step by step: a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in July 2007, then a full national Important Cultural Property in December 2009. It has also been listed among Japan's Modernization Industrial Heritage sites.

The history adds a further layer. The Shime operation is the only coal mine in Japan that was run by the state from opening to closure, first under the navy and then under the national railways. The tower is the most visible thing left from that story.

What to Look For

Stand at the base and the scale is hard to take in. The footprint is only about 15 by 12 meters, so the building reads as a narrow shaft of concrete shooting upward rather than a wide block. The lower floors, from the ground up to the fifth level, are essentially columns and beams with open sides. Walls appear only from the sixth floor up, where the structure needed to be enclosed.

The heart of the machine sat near the top. The eighth floor holds a tall open space that once housed a 1,000-horsepower motor, running almost without rest to wind the cages up and down the shaft. The cages carried both coal and the miners themselves, dropping into a vertical shaft 430 meters deep.

The exposed concrete is worth a close look. Decades of weather left the surface pitted and stained, and a major repair campaign between 2018 and 2021 stabilized the structure without hiding its age. Reinforcing bars that had corroded were cut out and replaced, and decayed concrete was filled, but the building still looks its years rather than freshly cast.

Visiting, and What Else Is Nearby

The headframe stands on the grounds of Shimate, a community and welfare complex run by the town, alongside open lawns and a children's playground called Nakayoshi Park. You can walk right up to the base and circle it, which is how most people see it. The interior is not normally open to visitors, though the town has published 360-degree virtual views of both the inside and the outside that are worth browsing before a trip.

A short walk toward the town center brings you to Shime Railway Memorial Park, laid out on the site of the former Shime Station. The Japanese National Railways line that once carried coal out of here, the Katsuta Line, closed in 1985. Platforms, a stretch of track, and old signals have been kept as monuments. Within the Shimate complex itself there is also a public bath where you can soak with the tower in view.

Shime has no train station of its own today. The simplest approach is a bus of about 40 minutes from the Hakata Station bus terminal to the Shimo-Shime stop, followed by a walk of roughly ten minutes uphill. The site sits close to Fukuoka Airport, so it fits easily into a day around the eastern edge of the city.