Studio

Inside the Ogurawa settlement at Chichibu Mine, a studio sits in the condition it was left when the community it served stopped functioning. Workbenches line the room. Equipment rests where it was set down. Decades of dust have settled across every surface, and light still enters through the windows as it always did, falling now on a room with no one in it. Nitchitsu Co. Ltd. built the Ogurawa settlement in the narrow upper Nakatsugawa valley in Saitama Prefecture to house the workers and families of Chichibu Mine. At its peak in the 1960s, the settlement contained company housing stratified by rank, a school, a clinic, a bathhouse, shops, an entertainment hall and a post office. Every element of civic life was built by, or built for, the mining company. The mine itself had a long history before the Nitchitsu group arrived. Gold was recorded at the site during the Keichō era, around 1608 to 1609. Industrial-scale operations under Nitchitsu's predecessor companies began in earnest from 1937, and full-scale mining commenced in 1940 with ore processing capacity of 4,000 tonnes per month. Metal extraction, primarily zinc and magnetite, continued through the 1960s at the mine's peak before the economics of domestic mining shifted. All metal extraction ceased in 1978. Limestone quarrying continued for decades after, but the workforce that had filled the settlement was already gone. The school, which had enrolled 274 students in 1959, closed in March 1984 with 7 students remaining. The last permanent resident left the Ogurawa settlement in September 2006. Chichibu Mine finally closed on 30 September 2022. This photograph, made in 2016, records the studio as the settlement had left it: workbenches, equipment, dust, and light coming through windows that no longer need to be opened.