The mine train has been stopped since April 2026; the headframe and the winding house have not.
The steel headframe can be seen from the road before you arrive, and beneath it is still the hall where the winches that lowered the men into the shaft used to turn. You walk round sheds, baths and storehouses that have stayed as the miners left them, and in some you look in from the corridor without entering. The little train that carried the coal out has been stopped since April 2026.
It was the largest shaft of the Miike coalfield complex, straddling the border between Kumamoto and Fukuoka, and was one of the engines of Japan's early industrialisation. Since 2015 it has been part of the UNESCO site ‘Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal Mining’. Next to the facilities is the 万田坑ステーション, the small building with the exhibition and the ticket office.
ℹ️ 9:30–17:00, last entry at 16:30. Closed on Mondays (if it is a public holiday, the first weekday after) and from 29 December to 3 January. Tickets 410 yen for adults and university students, 310 yen for high school students, 210 yen for junior high and elementary school pupils, free under six; reduced rates for groups of 30. The storehouse, pump room, safety lamp room and baths have been open to visitors since 2 April 2024, after seismic retrofitting, but you look at them from the corridor and do not go inside. ⚠️ The mine train has been suspended since April 2026 and no restart has been announced.
🚉 Arao · 25 min walk
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