Mountain View

The view through one of the milling-area windows at Ashio Copper Mine looks across the valley to the bare slopes opposite. A stand of conifers rises in the middle distance, but most of the surrounding country is exposed rock and scrub, the landscape that smelter fumes left behind. On the inside of the window frame, blue-green stains run down the wall where copper-oxide leached out of the metalwork. The frame itself is rusted at the joints. The window is missing two panes. The others are intact, but smeared with decades of dust. The view is sharper than the room it looks out of.

This is the Watarase valley, the catchment that carried Ashio's runoff for almost a century. From the mine and refinery, smelter fumes rose into the atmosphere and acid effluent flowed downhill to the river. Forests within fifty kilometres of the site were stripped bare; downstream farmers lost crops and livestock. The Meiji-era protests led by farmer-politician Tanaka Shōzō were Japan's first major environmental movement. They forced government investigation and partial remediation, but the damage was already done. Replanting started decades later, and in places the bare slopes are still recovering today, more than fifty years after the mine closed in 1973.