Nike Air

A single Nike Air trainer sits on the floor of a building within the Ogurawa settlement at Nichitsu, Saitama Prefecture. Its colours have faded and its sole is separating from the upper. Plaster dust and debris surround it. It is the kind of object that should not be there and yet feels entirely at home. The Ogurawa settlement was built from the late 1930s onwards by the Nichitsu mining company to house the workforce of Chichibu Mine, the sole significant metal mine in Saitama Prefecture. The company built everything: stratified housing with tiled-roof residences for managers and concrete apartment blocks for workers, a school, a clinic, a bathhouse, a cultural hall, a general store, and a post office. At its peak in the 1960s, annual crude ore output reached 500,000 tonnes, with zinc and magnetite as the primary extractions. The settlement held thousands of residents. Metal extraction ceased in 1978. Workers and families began leaving. The school, which had enrolled 274 students in 1959, closed in March 1984 with just 7 students in its final cohort. The last general store shut around 2003. The last permanent resident left the settlement in September 2006. Crystalline limestone quarrying continued at the mine until 30 September 2022, when Chichibu Mine closed after more than 400 years of intermittent operation. By 2016, when this photograph was made, the Ogurawa settlement had been uninhabited for a decade. The concrete apartment blocks and tiled-roof manager houses were deteriorating. A record snowfall in February 2014 had caused partial structural collapses in several buildings. Vegetation was reclaiming the valley. The trainer records something the research files cannot: a modern object carried into an old place by someone whose name and reason are unrecorded. The shoe sits in the frame as a mark of the gap between the settlement's history and its present condition. Part of the Nichitsu Mining Village series.