Bottles

A wooden shelf runs along the interior wall of a structure inside the Ogurawa settlement at Chichibu Mine, Saitama Prefecture. On it, several glass bottles sit exactly where they were left, coated in years of dust and grime. Paint or plaster has given way behind them. Whatever room this was, whatever purpose these bottles served, the person who last handled them is long gone. The Ogurawa settlement grew up around Chichibu Mine across the middle decades of the 20th century. The mine, operated from 1937 under the Nichitsu group and its successors, was the only significant metal mine in Saitama Prefecture. At its peak in the 1960s, the settlement functioned as a self-contained company town: concrete apartment blocks for workers, tiled-roof houses for management, a school, a clinic, a public bathhouse, a post office and at least two general stores. Everything that made ordinary life possible in a narrow mountain valley, more than 40 kilometres from Chichibu Station, was built by or for the mining company. Metal extraction ceased in 1978. Zinc, magnetite, gold and the other ores that had drawn industrial operations to this remote valley were no longer viable to extract. Crystalline limestone continued to be quarried, but the workforce shrank and families left. By 2003 the settlement's last general store had closed. By September 2006 the last permanent resident had gone, and the Ogurawa settlement was formally classified as uninhabited. These bottles on their shelf are from after all of that. Sixteen years of mountain weather, a record snowfall in February 2014 that collapsed sections of several buildings, and the slow encroachment of the valley's dense forest have worked on the structures since. What the photograph records in 2016 is the residue of daily life in a community that existed in full and then, incrementally, did not.