Living Quarters

A fusuma panel lies collapsed across the tatami matting of a residential room in the Ogurawa settlement, the company housing precinct of Chichibu Mine in Saitama Prefecture, Japan. The shoji screens at the far wall remain standing. Built-in shelving lines the wall beside them. Debris covers the floor. The room is otherwise structurally intact, which makes the collapsed panel the more telling detail: one element of a carefully ordered domestic interior, now on the ground. The Ogurawa settlement was built by and for the mining operation known variously as Chichibu Mine, Nichitsu Mine, and Nakatsugawa Mine, operated from 1937 by subsidiaries of the Nichitsu Konzern under Nitchitsu Co. Ltd. and its predecessors. Company housing was stratified by rank. Managers' residences had tiled roofs and private amenities. Workers' apartment blocks were concrete, with shared bathrooms and communal facilities. Alongside the housing sat a school, a clinic, a public bathhouse, shops, a post office, and a cultural hall with a cinema and dance floor. Every element of civic life in the valley was built around the mine. Metal extraction peaked in the 1960s, with annual crude ore output reaching 500,000 tonnes and the settlement reportedly more prosperous than the downtown centre of Chichibu City. All metal mining ceased in 1978 as cheaper imports displaced domestic production. 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 retail outlet, Hikokubo Shop, ceased trading around 2003. The last permanent resident left the Ogurawa settlement in September 2006. Crystalline limestone extraction continued under Nitchitsu until 30 September 2022, when the mine officially closed after more than 400 years of intermittent operation. The residential buildings remain on private land. This photograph was made in 2016, a decade after the settlement was classified as uninhabited.