Study Room

A CRT monitor and keyboard sit on a low timber table over deteriorating tatami matting. The shoji windows behind them are shattered, curtains reduced to hanging strips, and through the broken frames the dense green hills of the upper Nakatsugawa valley are visible at close range. The room is small and specific: a study space, the kind of domestic arrangement common in the company housing that Nitchitsu Co. Ltd. built and maintained for the Chichibu Mine workforce. The Ogurawa settlement occupied a narrow valley approximately 43 kilometres west of Chichibu Station, accessed via Prefectural Road 210. Every element of its civic infrastructure, housing, school, clinic, bathhouse, post office, shops, was built by or for the mining operation. Company housing was stratified by rank: concrete apartment blocks for workers, tiled-roof houses for management. The timber table and tatami floor visible here are characteristic of the worker residences, modest and functional. The mine itself, known as Chichibu Mine, had operated in various forms since gold was recorded in the area during the Keichō era (1608-1609). Full-scale industrial metal mining under Nitchitsu's direction commenced in 1940. Production peaked in the 1960s, when the settlement was described as more prosperous than downtown Chichibu. Metal extraction ceased in 1978, and with it the population began to leave. The school, which had enrolled 274 students in 1959, closed in March 1984 with 7 students remaining. By 2006, the last permanent resident had left the Ogurawa settlement, and it was formally classified as uninhabited. The mine continued extracting crystalline limestone until 30 September 2022, but the residential community was long gone. This photograph, made in 2016, records what remained: a study table, a dead screen, tatami splitting at the seams, and the forest moving in through the broken glass.