Piano Keys

Inside a residence at the Ogurawa settlement, a piano stands in a state of advanced decay. The ivory and ebony keys are broken and displaced. Dust has settled across the keyboard and the instrument's frame, which has deteriorated significantly over the years since the building was last occupied. It is the kind of object that was too large, or too heavy, or simply too tied to a life already gone to take along. The Ogurawa settlement was built to support the Chichibu Mine, a metal and mineral extraction operation in the upper Nakatsugawa valley in Saitama Prefecture, operated from 1937 under the Nichitsu group and its successors. Company housing at the settlement was stratified by rank: managers' residences had tiled roofs and domestic amenities, while workers' apartment blocks were concrete structures with shared facilities. A piano in a residence points toward the manager tier of that hierarchy. The mine's workforce peaked during the 1960s, when the settlement reportedly held over 2,000 residents and annual crude ore output reached 500,000 tonnes, with zinc and magnetite as the primary extractions. Metal mining ceased in 1978. From that point, families left as the mine contracted, the school enrolment fell from 274 students in 1959 to 7 in 1984, and the school closed in March of that year. The settlement's last retail outlet stopped trading in 2003. By September 2006, the final permanent resident had departed, and the Ogurawa settlement was formally classified as uninhabited. The piano in this photograph was captured in 2016, a decade after that classification. The Chichibu Mine itself continued limited crystalline limestone operations until 30 September 2022, but the residential settlement had long since emptied. What the photograph records is what remained: an instrument, a room, and the dust that accumulated across both once nobody was left to disturb it.