Bedroom

The room is small and domestic in the way that company housing always is: functional dimensions, no excess. Tatami matting covers the floor, debris scattered across the surface in the particular way things settle when no one has moved them for years. Shoji screens line three walls, their paper panels torn in several places, light coming through the gaps without ceremony. Against the fusuma closet doors, a CRT television sits on the floor, its screen dark. Whatever was in those closets stayed behind too. This was workers' housing. The Ogurawa settlement, set in the narrow upper Nakatsugawa valley in Saitama Prefecture, was built and owned entirely by Nitchitsu Co. Ltd. to house the workforce of Chichibu Mine. Company housing here was stratified by rank: concrete apartment blocks with shared facilities for miners, tiled-roof residences with domestic amenities for management. This room, with its tatami and shoji and fusuma, is the texture of ordinary life inside that hierarchy. Chichibu Mine was operated under the broader Nichitsu group from 1937 and reached its peak in the 1960s, when annual output hit 500,000 tonnes of crude ore and the settlement was reportedly more prosperous than downtown Chichibu. Metal extraction, primarily zinc and magnetite, ceased in 1978. Families began to leave as the mine contracted to limestone quarrying alone. By 2002 the settlement population was around 100 people. The last general store, Hikokubo Shop, closed in 2003. In September 2006 the final permanent resident left the Ogurawa settlement, and the residential area was classified as uninhabited. This photograph was made in 2016. The television has been on the floor for at least a decade by then, possibly longer. The mine itself continued limestone operations until 30 September 2022, more than 400 years after gold was first recorded in this valley. The settlement that housed its workforce had already been empty for sixteen years.