Public Bath

The public bathhouse at Nichitsu Mining Village sits inside the Ogurawa settlement, a narrow-valley company town built into the upper Nakatsugawa in Saitama Prefecture. Rusting pipes line the walls. Floor tiles, once a practical surface for a space that saw daily use, are cracked and broken, their fragments settled where they fell. Paint and render have pulled away from the upper walls. The room is quiet in a way that reads as absolute. The settlement was purpose-built infrastructure. Nitchitsu Co. Ltd. and its predecessors constructed everything the workforce required in this remote location: concrete apartment blocks for workers, tiled-roof houses for management, a clinic, a school, a post office, shops, a cultural hall, and shared bathing facilities. Company housing for workers included no private bathrooms, making the public bathhouse a daily necessity rather than a convenience. It was the place where the grime of underground work, zinc and magnetite ore dust from shifts in the Daikoku, Akaiwa, and Doshinkubo deposits, was washed away before the evening. The Ogurawa settlement reached its peak in the 1960s, when the mine was pulling 500,000 tonnes of crude ore annually and the community reportedly numbered in the thousands. Metal extraction ceased in 1978. Workers and families began leaving. Enrolment at the settlement school, which had peaked at 274 students in 1959, fell to 7 by 1984, when the school closed. The last permanent resident left the Ogurawa settlement in September 2006. This photograph was made in 2016, a decade into the silence. The bathhouse has no occupants, no purpose, no maintenance. What the frame records is the specific character of abandonment in a place that was, for a generation of mining families, simply where you went at the end of the day.