Garden

A concrete path follows the exterior wall of a timber-framed building in the Ogurawa settlement at Chichibu Mine, in the upper Nakatsugawa valley of Saitama Prefecture. Bare deciduous trees stand immediately alongside the wall, their branches tracing the pale sky. Spring growth pushes up through a thick layer of dead leaf litter on the path. Grid windows in the building's wall reflect cloud above. The timber cladding is weathered. No signs remain. The Ogurawa settlement was developed by the Nichitsu group from 1937 onward to house the Chichibu Mine workforce. Company housing was stratified by rank: managers occupied tiled-roof single-family residences, while workers lived in concrete apartment blocks with shared facilities. The settlement at its 1960s peak supported a population of over 2,000 people in this narrow mountain valley, approximately 43 kilometres west of Chichibu Station. Infrastructure extended to a school, clinic, bathhouse, post office, shops, and an entertainment hall. Metal mining ceased at Chichibu Mine in 1978. Families began leaving as the workforce contracted. The school, which had enrolled 274 students in 1959, closed in March 1984 with a final cohort of 7. The settlement's last general store ceased trading around 2003. By September 2006 the last permanent resident had left the Ogurawa settlement, and it was formally classified as uninhabited. This photograph was made in 2016, a decade into that silence. The valley's dense mountain forest had been closing in steadily. Spring, indifferent to the absence of residents, was pushing through the leaf litter on the path. The building stands as company housing once stood across this valley: functional, ranked, and built entirely to serve an operation that no longer exists. Chichibu Mine closed permanently on 30 September 2022 after more than 400 years of intermittent operation. Part of the Nichitsu Mining Village series.