Road

The road runs straight for a stretch before the valley bends it out of sight. Susuki grass, dry and pale, pushes up through cracks in the asphalt and spills across the verge. Timber buildings and corrugated-iron facades line the right side, their rooflines intact but their interiors long emptied. Power lines cross overhead, still strung between poles as though the settlement might yet need them. Dense mountain forest presses in on three sides, the treeline sitting close enough that the valley feels sealed. This is the main road through the Ogurawa settlement, the residential and civic heart of the Chichibu Mine complex in the upper Nakatsugawa valley. The mine was acquired by the Nichitsu group in 1937, and full-scale operations began in 1940. The company built everything the settlement required: worker apartment blocks and manager residences, a clinic, a bathhouse, shops, a post office, and a school. At its peak in the 1960s, the settlement held several thousand residents, and a description from 1965 noted it was more prosperous than downtown Chichibu. Metal mining ceased in 1978 as cheaper imports displaced domestic production. Workers and families left in stages across the following decades. The school, which had enrolled 274 students in 1959, closed in March 1984 with 7 students remaining. The settlement's last shop stopped trading around 2003. The simple post office, which had served the community since the Taisho era, permanently closed on 5 June 2018. The last permanent resident left in September 2006. When this photograph was made in 2016, the Ogurawa settlement had been uninhabited for a decade. The mine itself would not close until 30 September 2022, when crystalline limestone extraction finally ended after more than 400 years of intermittent operation at the site. What the photograph records is the road between those two endpoints: the community already gone, the mine still running somewhere above the treeline, the valley quietly taking back what was built across it.