Ashio Copper Mine

The image is taken from across the Watarase valley, looking back at the Ashio Copper Mine and its processing plant on the opposite slope. The plant is built directly into the mountainside, a staircase of grey concrete and corrugated iron stepping down from the entrance to the mine head at the top, through milling and refinery levels, to the river at the bottom. A large landslide scar runs down the slope to the right of the works. Below the plant, the valley floor is bare. The mountains around the site are still mostly bare too, more than a century after the original deforestation.

Ashio was Japan's largest copper mine for most of its working life. It started as a small Edo-period mine and was modernised on industrial lines from 1877 onwards. By the early twentieth century Ashio was Japan's largest copper producer. It also became infamous for the pollution it pushed downstream. Smelter fumes killed off the surrounding forest, and acid runoff into the Watarase River poisoned farms for hundreds of kilometres. The Watarase basin protests of the 1890s are sometimes called the country's first major environmental movement. The mine kept running through both world wars and into the postwar reconstruction, before finally closing in 1973.