Dining Room

The dining room inside the Ogurawa settlement at Chichibu Mine sits as it was left: tables and chairs in place, surfaces thick with dust, sunlight crossing the floor through windows that no longer have anyone to open them. Nothing has been cleared. Nothing has been rearranged. The room simply stopped being used. The Ogurawa settlement was a full company town, built and operated by Nichitsu Mining Co. Ltd. in the upper Nakatsugawa valley of Saitama Prefecture, roughly 43 kilometres west of Chichibu Station. Every element of civic life was built around the mine: company housing stratified by rank, a school, a clinic, a bathhouse, a post office, shops, a cultural hall with a cinema. At the settlement's peak in the 1960s, when annual crude ore output reached 500,000 tonnes and zinc and magnetite were the primary products, the population numbered in the thousands. The mine's metal extraction ceased in 1978. From that point, families began leaving. The school's enrolment had peaked at 274 students in 1959; by 1984, 7 students remained, and the school closed in March of that year. The last general store, Hikokubo Shop, ceased trading in 2003. The last permanent resident left the Ogurawa settlement in September 2006. The Chichibu Mine itself continued operating on a reduced basis, extracting crystalline limestone until 30 September 2022, when it closed after more than 400 years of intermittent operation. Business offices shut permanently on 31 December 2022. When this photograph was made in 2016, the settlement had been uninhabited for a decade. The dining room records that interval precisely: furniture positioned for a meal that was never served, light falling on a room that outlasted the community it fed.