Looking Out

A timber window frame, its paint long gone and its edges rounded by years of damp and cold, is all that separates one darkened interior from the wall of forest outside. The photograph was made in 2016, a decade after the last permanent resident left the Ogurawa settlement in September 2006. The valley's mountain forest, dense and indifferent, fills the view completely. The Ogurawa settlement sits in the narrow upper Nakatsugawa valley in Chichibu City, Saitama Prefecture, roughly 43 kilometres west of Chichibu Station. It was built as company housing for the workforce of Chichibu Mine, operated from 1937 onwards by the Nichitsu group and later by Nitchitsu Co. Ltd. The settlement's company housing was stratified by rank: concrete apartment blocks for miners, tiled-roof houses with domestic amenities for management. The infrastructure the company built extended to a school, a clinic, a public bathhouse, a post office and a cultural hall with a cinema. Gold mining in the Nakatsugawa valley dates to the Keichō era, around 1608 to 1609. Full-scale industrial extraction under Nitchitsu began in 1940. At its peak in the 1960s, the mine processed up to 500,000 tonnes of crude ore annually, extracting zinc, magnetite and other metals. Contemporary accounts describe the settlement as more prosperous than downtown Chichibu. The school enrolled 274 students in 1959. Metal mining ceased in 1978. Workers and their families left steadily through the 1980s and 1990s. School enrolment fell from 160 students in 1972 to 7 in the final cohort of 1984, when Ogurawa Elementary and Middle School closed. The last general store stopped trading around 2003. The simple post office permanently closed in June 2018. This window records that process of departure in material form. The frame holds its shape. The forest outside holds its ground.