Dentist

The dental chair sits where it was left, corroded to a deep orange-brown, its instrument arm still extended over the seat. Dust has settled across every surface in the room: the fittings, the tray, the floor. Paint has separated from the walls in wide sheets. Nothing in the frame has been moved. The room was part of the on-site clinic that served the Ogurawa settlement, the residential community built by the Nichitsu group to house the workforce and families of Chichibu Mine. The settlement occupied a narrow mountain valley in what is now Chichibu City, Saitama Prefecture, approximately 43 kilometres west of Chichibu Station. At its peak in the 1960s, the mine produced around 500,000 tonnes of crude ore annually, primarily zinc and magnetite, and the settlement operated as a self-contained community with company housing, a school, a bathhouse, shops, a post office, and a clinic. Chichibu Mine was operated through successive subsidiaries of the Nichitsu Konzern, the industrial group founded by Noguchi Jun. Full-scale mining under Nichitsu control commenced in 1940. Metal extraction at the site ceased in 1978 as cheaper imports displaced domestic production. Limestone quarrying continued for decades longer, but with a workforce only a fraction of its former size. The last permanent resident left the Ogurawa settlement in September 2006. By the time this photograph was made in 2016, the settlement had been uninhabited for a decade. The clinic, the housing blocks, the cultural hall and the school were all standing, left as the community departed. The dental chair in this frame records a piece of the settlement's civic life that no amount of limestone could sustain once the families were gone. Chichibu Mine itself did not close until 30 September 2022, ending more than 400 years of intermittent mining in the valley. The buildings remained. Part of the Nichitsu Mining Village series.