Laundry

A washing line still crosses the interior of this room, faded laundry hanging exactly as it was left. It is one of the more disarming details a photograph can hold: not machinery, not architecture, but the residue of a Tuesday morning. Someone had washing to do, and then they did not come back. The room sits within the Ogurawa settlement, the residential community that Nitchitsu Co. Ltd. built in the upper Nakatsugawa valley to house the workforce of the Chichibu Mine. Worker accommodation took the form of concrete apartment blocks with shared facilities and no private bathrooms. Management occupied separate tiled-roof houses. The hierarchy was legible in the architecture. The Chichibu Mine itself operated across an extraordinary span of time. Gold was recorded here during the Keichō era, around 1608 to 1609. Full-scale industrial mining began under the Nichitsu group from 1937, and the settlement expanded through the 1940s and into the postwar decades with company housing, a clinic, a public bathhouse, shops, a post office and a school. By the 1960s, the settlement reportedly held upwards of 2,000 residents. The school enrolled 274 students at its peak in 1959. Metal extraction ceased in 1978. Zinc and magnetite gave way to crystalline limestone, and the workforce contracted with the ore. Families left. The school enrolment fell from 274 to 7 students by 1984, when Ogurawa Elementary and Middle School closed. The last shop ceased trading around 2003. The simple post office closed permanently in June 2018. The last permanent resident left the settlement in September 2006. What the photograph records is the domestic interior of that departure. The laundry is still there. The walls are peeling. The light comes in. The Chichibu Mine finally closed on 30 September 2022, after more than 400 years of intermittent operation. This frame was made in 2016, sixteen years after the settlement emptied and six years before the mine followed it.