Hiroko Kumagai will never forget the day in 1998 when she first stepped inside the red-brick building at the entrance to the closed and shuttered Miyahara shaft in the Miike coal mine in Omuta, Fukuoka Prefecture.
"I felt I heard the voices of people working underground," she said during a recent interview. "I have never had an experience like that before in my long career as documentary filmmaker.
"I felt the power emanating from that place and from its history — the history of the people who had worked in the mine and lived in the mining town had imprinted itself on that place."