Manda Pit

The steel headframe of the No. 2 shaft rises 18.8 m over a patch of grass in Arao, just south of the Fukuoka border. It was finished in 1908, and next to it is the two-storey brick winding house of 1909 that worked the cages up and down the shaft. Mitsui began sinking the first shaft in 1897 and coal output started in 1902. Through the 1930s and early 1940s this was one of the two main pits of the Miike mine, with the Miyanohara Pit 1.5 km to the north; from 1927 to 1945 it raised about 16.4 million tonnes. Mining stopped in 1951 when the seams became uneconomic, but the shaft was kept for drainage and mine maintenance until March 1997, when the whole Miike mine closed.

Manda is one of four sites that make up the Miike Coal Mine and Miike Port part of the Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution, inscribed in July 2015. The others are in Omuta, Fukuoka: the Miyanohara Pit, the line of the coal railway, and Miike Port, the lock-gated harbour that opened in 1908 to load coal onto large ships.

A visit is a loop round the headframe, the winding house, the pump room, the small bathhouse and a shrine to the mountain god where miners prayed before going down. Free guided tours start at 9:55, 10:55, 12:55, 13:55 and 14:55 and cannot be booked; they make the place make sense. It is a quiet, slightly bleak site, rust and brick under a big sky, and that is much of its appeal. Start at Mandako Station, the free exhibition hall by the car park. Allow an hour, more if you add Miyanohara, which is free and a short drive away. Arao and Omuta are not on most itineraries, so you will rarely queue.