Living Room

The room is small. A grimy window admits the only light, falling across furniture left exactly where someone last used it. Wallpaper lifts from the walls in long strips. Dust covers every surface in a uniform grey. Nothing has been cleared out. Whatever life was lived here departed and left the contents behind. This is company housing from the Ogurawa settlement, the residential community built by the Nichitsu mining group to support operations at Chichibu Mine in the upper Nakatsugawa valley, Saitama Prefecture. The settlement was constructed to a hierarchy: tiled-roof houses for management, concrete apartment blocks for workers, with shared bathhouses, a clinic, shops and a school all built and operated by the company. At the settlement's peak in the 1960s, the valley held a large resident population sustained entirely by the mine. Chichibu Mine had been worked in various forms since the Keichō era, with gold recorded from around 1608. Under the Nichitsu mining group from 1937, the operation expanded to full industrial scale, extracting zinc, magnetite, gold, copper, lead and silver. Ore processing capacity grew from 4,000 tonnes per month at the start of full operations in 1940 to 48,000 tonnes per month by 1970. The settlement grew with it. The contraction was just as definitive. All metal extraction ceased in 1978. Workers and families began leaving. The school, which had enrolled 274 students in 1959, closed in March 1984 with 7 students remaining. The last shop ceased trading around 2003. The post office converted to limited hours and eventually closed permanently on 5 June 2018. The last permanent resident left the Ogurawa settlement in September 2006. This photograph was made in 2016, a decade into that silence. The furniture in the frame is what remains of an ordinary domestic life inside a community that the mine built, sustained, and then could no longer support.