Storeroom

Inside one of the Ogurawa settlement's storerooms, shelves of forgotten supplies stand exactly as they were left. Dust has settled over every surface. Light from a grimy window cuts across the interior, making visible what time has slowly covered: containers, equipment, the ordinary stock of a working building now emptied of purpose. The Ogurawa settlement sits in a narrow valley along the upper Nakatsugawa river in Chichibu City, Saitama Prefecture, roughly 43 kilometres west of Chichibu Station. It was the residential and civic heart of Chichibu Mine, known also as Nichitsu Mine after the operating company, Nitchitsu Co. Ltd. The mine's origins reach back to gold workings recorded during the Keichō era (1608-1609), but the modern settlement took shape from 1937 onwards as the Nichitsu group expanded operations in earnest. By the 1960s the mine was extracting around 500,000 tonnes of crude ore per year, and the settlement around it had grown to include company housing, a school, a clinic, a public bathhouse, shops, and an entertainment hall. Metal mining at Chichibu Mine ceased in 1978 as cheaper imported metals undercut domestic production. Families left in steady numbers through the late 1970s and into the 1980s. The school, which had enrolled 274 students at its peak in 1959, closed in March 1984 with just 7 students remaining. The settlement's last general store stopped trading around 2003. In September 2006, the last permanent resident left the Ogurawa settlement. By 2016, when this photograph was made, the storeroom had stood silent for a decade. The supplies on the shelves were not removed, not sorted, not taken. They were simply left, as though whoever locked the door expected to return. The mine itself continued crystalline limestone extraction until 30 September 2022, when operations ceased after more than 400 years of intermittent activity. The storeroom, and the settlement around it, records what that long withdrawal looked like from the inside.