Overgrowth

The concrete apartment blocks of the Ogurawa settlement were built for miners, not for aesthetics. Company housing at Chichibu Mine was stratified by rank: managers occupied tiled-roof residences with domestic amenities, while workers' families lived in blocks like these, shared facilities, no private bathrooms, pressed into whatever flat ground the narrow Nakatsugawa valley allowed. The mountain sits directly behind them. There was nowhere else to put them. Chichibu Mine came under the Nichitsu group in 1937 when Nihon Chisso Hiryo acquired mining rights from Yanagise Shoko Co., who had operated the site since 1910. Full-scale industrial operations commenced in 1940, and the settlement expanded to match: company housing, a clinic, a bathhouse, shops, a school. The school alone peaked at 274 students in 1959. By the mid-1960s the settlement was reportedly more prosperous than downtown Chichibu, with ore processing capacity that would reach 48,000 tonnes per month by 1970. Metal extraction ceased in 1978. The enrolment figures track what happened next more precisely than any production graph: 160 students in 1972, 85 in 1973, 46 in 1974, 25 in 1975, 7 in 1984. The school closed in March 1984. The post office downgraded to simple post office status in 1986 and permanently closed on 5 June 2018. The last permanent resident left the Ogurawa settlement in September 2006. This photograph, made in 2016, records the decade after that departure. Dry grass stands chest-high between the buildings. A timber utility pole carries lines that connect nothing. The windows are still intact, but the rooflines have begun to sag under the weight of years and, since February 2014, the weight of exceptional snow. The forest behind presses down, patient and indifferent. The mine that built all of this officially closed on 30 September 2022, after more than 400 years of intermittent operation.