Balcony

The balcony is a modest thing: a slab of concrete on the face of a worker apartment block in the Ogurawa settlement, part of the Chichibu Mine complex in the upper Nakatsugawa valley, Saitama Prefecture. Rust has tracked down the rendered walls in long vertical streaks, and the vegetation that covers the surrounding slopes has taken hold at the building's edges, pressing into the structure from below and through its joints. Nothing has been repaired here in a long time. The settlement was built by Nitchitsu and its predecessor companies from 1937 onwards to house the workforce that operated Chichibu Mine, the sole significant metal mine in Saitama Prefecture. Company housing was stratified by rank: managers occupied single-family residences with tiled roofs; workers lived in concrete apartment blocks with shared facilities and no private bathrooms. The balcony in this frame belongs to the latter category. By the 1960s, the mine was producing 500,000 tonnes of crude ore annually. The settlement at its peak housed a community large enough to sustain a school, a clinic, a bathhouse, a cinema and cultural hall, a post office, and at least two general stores. All of it was built by the company; all of it contracted when the mine did. Metal extraction at Chichibu Mine ceased in 1978. Families left as the work disappeared. The school, which had enrolled 274 students in 1959, closed in March 1984 with a final cohort of 7. The last permanent resident left the Ogurawa settlement in September 2006. By then the buildings had been emptying for nearly three decades. This photograph was made in 2016, a decade after the settlement was classified as uninhabited. The mine itself continued extracting crystalline limestone until 30 September 2022, when operations formally ended after more than 400 years of intermittent working at the site. The apartment blocks remain, and the valley's forest is doing what mountain forest does.