Genkan

The genkan is the first and last threshold of a Japanese home: where shoes come off, where the outside world stops. In this former company residence at the Ogurawa settlement, a pair of shoes remains on the step. Dust covers them. Fading light enters the decaying entryway, and nothing else has moved. The Ogurawa settlement was built to house the workforce of Chichibu Mine, known also as Nichitsu Mine after the operating company. The mine sits in the upper Nakatsugawa valley, approximately 43 kilometres west of Chichibu Station in Saitama Prefecture. Company housing was stratified by rank: managers received tiled-roof houses with domestic amenities; workers were housed in concrete apartment blocks with shared facilities. The residence this genkan belongs to was one of those company homes, built to hold a family for as long as the mine had use for them. Metal extraction at Chichibu Mine ceased in 1978. Zinc, magnetite, gold, copper and lead had drawn people to this remote valley since at least 1608; when the ore was no longer worth extracting at scale, the reason to stay began to dissolve. Families left through the late 1970s and into the 1980s, following work to other towns. The settlement's school, which had enrolled 274 students in 1959, closed in March 1984 with 7 students remaining. The last retail shop ceased trading in 2003. The last permanent resident departed the Ogurawa settlement in September 2006. The shoes in the frame were left behind somewhere in that long contraction. The genkan that holds them is now part of the photographic record of the Nichitsu Mining Village series, documented in 2016 before further deterioration claimed more of the settlement's interior spaces.