Main Entrance

The concrete threshold of the Ogurawa settlement's main entrance stands partially consumed by the dense mountain foliage of the upper Nakatsugawa valley. Weathered and open, it marks the boundary between the valley road and the company town that once lay beyond it. By 2016, a decade after the last permanent resident departed in September 2006, the surrounding vegetation had advanced steadily across surfaces and through gaps that maintenance had once kept clear. The settlement behind this entrance was built and owned outright by Nitchitsu Co. Ltd., the mining company that operated Chichibu Mine from 1937. Every element of civic life here, worker apartment blocks with shared facilities, tiled-roof manager residences, a school, a clinic, a public bathhouse, a post office, a cultural hall, general stores, was constructed to support a workforce extracting zinc, magnetite, gold, copper, lead and other metals from the skarn deposits beneath the surrounding mountains. At peak production in the 1960s, the settlement reportedly held thousands of residents and was described as more prosperous than downtown Chichibu. Metal extraction at Chichibu Mine ceased in 1978. Workers and families began leaving as the economic basis for the community contracted. The mine continued crystalline limestone operations, but with a fraction of its former workforce. The Ogurawa Elementary and Middle School, which had enrolled 274 students in 1959, closed in March 1984 with just 7 students remaining. The last general store ceased trading in 2003. The post office permanently closed on 5 June 2018. What this photograph records is the entrance to a community that no longer exists as a living place. The concrete still defines the threshold. The foliage does not distinguish between what was built for managers and what was built for workers. The mine that the Nichitsu Konzern expanded into a significant industrial operation closed on 30 September 2022, ending more than 400 years of intermittent mining in the Nakatsugawa valley.