Managers Office

The manager's office at Ashio Copper Mine sits in a separate building above the processing plant, a single room with a desk along one wall, a meeting table in the centre, and a row of filing cabinets along the opposite wall. The desk is timber, varnished darker than the floor, with a writing surface scuffed at the working positions. A telephone sits at one end, the receiver in its cradle. A wall-mounted map of the mine area hangs behind the desk, the lines and labels in Japanese, the paper yellowed at the edges. A coat rack sits behind the door. The filing cabinets are dark green steel, each drawer labelled in Japanese. The light comes through a single window facing the valley.

The manager's office was where the operational decisions of the mine were made: shift schedules, ore-quality issues, equipment failures, dealings with the Furukawa company head office. The Excavation Department at Ashio closed in 1973. The office was vacated at that time. The desk, the map, and the filing cabinets are mostly as they were left, with anything portable carried away in the days after closure. What is in the photograph is the working layout of a senior employee's room at the end of the mine's working life.