Kettle

A rusted enamel kettle sits on a wooden shelf inside one of the Ogurawa settlement's derelict company houses. Dust has settled across its surface in an even, undisturbed layer. Nothing else occupies the shelf. The room around it carries the condition of nearly two decades without a resident. The Ogurawa settlement, in the upper Nakatsugawa valley of Saitama Prefecture, was built and owned by Nitchitsu Co. Ltd. to support the workforce of Chichibu Mine. Company housing was stratified by rank: concrete apartment blocks for miners, tiled-roof houses for management. Every element of the settlement's infrastructure, the school, the clinic, the bathhouse, the shops, was built by or for the mining company. The community's fortunes were entirely tied to what was being extracted from the surrounding mountains. Chichibu Mine had operated in some form since gold was recorded in the Keichō era in 1608. Full-scale industrial mining began in 1940 under the Nichitsu group. Through the 1960s, at the mine's peak, annual output reached 500,000 tonnes of crude ore, and the settlement was reported as more prosperous than downtown Chichibu. Zinc and magnetite were the primary metals. Then, in 1978, all metal extraction ceased. Only crystalline limestone continued. Workers and their families began leaving. The school, which had enrolled 274 students in 1959, closed in March 1984 with a final cohort of 7. The settlement's last retail shop closed in 2003. The last permanent resident left in September 2006. The mine itself ran until 30 September 2022, when crystalline limestone operations finally ended after more than 400 years of intermittent extraction. The business office shuttered on 31 December 2022. The kettle in this photograph was captured in 2016, a decade after the settlement emptied. It had not been moved. It records, without embellishment, what daily life in a mining community left behind.