Kitchen

The kitchen at Nichitsu Mining Village is a small room with a rusted stove and sink, both coated in a thick layer of dust. Paint has deteriorated from the walls. The fittings stay where they were placed decades ago, intact but corroded, the surfaces grey with accumulated years. Nothing has been cleared away. The space simply stopped. The kitchen was part of the Ogurawa settlement, the company-town community built by Nitchitsu to support the Chichibu Mine workforce in the Nakatsugawa valley, approximately 43 kilometres west of Chichibu Station in Saitama Prefecture. The mine, formally known as Chichibu Mine, had operated in various forms since at least 1608. Full-scale industrial mining under the Nichitsu group began in 1940, and at its peak in the 1960s the settlement housed well over 2,000 residents. The company built everything the community needed: housing stratified by rank, a school, a clinic, a bathhouse, shops, a cultural hall for films and performances. The settlement's company housing was built in distinct tiers. Workers occupied concrete apartment blocks with shared facilities. Managers lived in separate houses with tiled roofs. The kitchen in this photograph belonged to one of those residential spaces, built for a workforce whose daily lives were entirely structured around the mine. Metal extraction at Chichibu Mine ceased in 1978, after which only crystalline limestone operations continued. The workforce contracted, families left, and the settlement emptied progressively over the following decades. The last permanent resident departed in September 2006, at which point the Ogurawa settlement was formally classified as uninhabited. By 2016, when this photograph was made, the kitchen had been unoccupied for a decade. The stove and sink remained exactly as left: rusted, dust-covered, still standing in a room that once anchored the domestic rhythm of a miner's household. Chichibu Mine did not close until 30 September 2022, when its final limestone operations ended after more than 400 years of intermittent extraction. The kitchen recorded here had already been still for sixteen of those years.