Locker Room

Inside one of the worker facilities at Chichibu Mine's Ogurawa settlement, a locker room sits as it was left. Rusting metal lockers line the walls, most doors hanging open on corroded hinges or missing entirely. Debris covers the floor. The ceiling fittings remain, and natural light cuts across the room, picking out the rust streaks and accumulated grime on every surface. The Ogurawa settlement was built to house the workforce of Chichibu Mine, operated under the Nichitsu group from 1937. The company constructed everything a community needed in a remote mountain valley: housing stratified by rank, a clinic, a bathhouse, a school, shops and shared facilities for the miners and their families. A locker room like this one was a daily threshold, the place where a shift began and ended. Metal extraction at Chichibu Mine peaked during the 1960s, when annual output reached 500,000 tonnes of crude ore, primarily zinc and magnetite. From that peak, the decline was steady. All metal mining ceased in 1978. Limestone extraction continued for decades more, but the workforce and the community contracted sharply. The school, which had enrolled 274 students in 1959, closed in March 1984 with 7 students remaining. The last permanent resident left the Ogurawa settlement in September 2006. Chichibu Mine ran for over 400 years in various forms, from Keichō-era gold workings recorded in 1608 through to the closure of its crystalline limestone operations on 30 September 2022. What this photograph records is an earlier stillness: the settlement a decade into its uninhabited years, the lockers open and empty, the floor collecting whatever drifted in. The mine continued operating well beyond this frame, but the people who used this room were long gone.