Bridge

Inside the Ogurawa settlement, in the narrow upper Nakatsugawa valley about 43 kilometres west of Chichibu Station, a concrete bridge crosses a chasm in the valley floor. Moss covers most of the deck. Vines have worked their way into the structure from the edges and below, and the mountain forest presses in from both sides. The photograph was made in 2016, a decade after the settlement was classified as uninhabited. The bridge was part of an extensive piece of company-built infrastructure in what was, at its peak in the 1960s, a fully self-contained mining community. Chichibu Mine operated under the Nitchitsu group, a subsidiary of the Nichitsu Konzern founded by industrialist Noguchi Jun. The Ogurawa settlement that grew around it included company housing stratified by rank, a school, a clinic, a bathhouse, shops, a post office, and an entertainment hall. Every element of civic life was tied to the mine's fortunes. Metal mining at Chichibu Mine ceased in 1978. Through the following decades, workers and their families left the valley. The settlement's last permanent resident departed in September 2006. The school, which had enrolled 274 students in 1959, closed in March 1984 with a final cohort of 7. The mine itself continued limited crystalline limestone extraction until 30 September 2022, when it closed after more than 400 years of intermittent operation. What remains in the valley now is what the forest has not yet finished with. Concrete structures, timber frames, a fire watchtower, apartment blocks, the roads and bridges that connected them. The photograph records one of those connections: a bridge built to move people through a living settlement, now being methodically unmade by the same mountain environment it was once set against.