Yokusou

The Yokusou bathhouse sits within the Ogurawa settlement at Chichibu Mine, in the upper Nakatsugawa valley of Saitama Prefecture, roughly 43 kilometres west of Chichibu Station. Sunlight cuts through broken windows and falls across cracked tiles and rusted pipes, the room open to the elements in a way it was never designed to be. The bathhouse was a shared facility, built because the workers' concrete apartment blocks provided no private bathing. In a company town where the operating company, Nitchitsu Co. Ltd., built and controlled every element of civic infrastructure, communal bathing was a practical necessity. The Ogurawa settlement at its height housed more than 2,000 residents in a narrow mountain valley accessible only by a single prefectural road. A full school, a post office, a clinic, an entertainment hall, shops and company housing all served a population whose lives were organised entirely around the mine below. Chichibu Mine's metal extraction ceased in 1978, and the community contracted sharply in the years that followed. Families left as the economic basis for the settlement disappeared. By 2003 the last general store had closed. By September 2006 the last permanent resident had left the Ogurawa settlement, and the area was officially classified as uninhabited. The bathhouse photographed here in 2016 had been empty for a decade by then. Its tiles remain in place along cracked and water-damaged surfaces. Pipes that once carried hot water to the baths are exposed and heavily rusted. The windows, long broken, let in both light and weather, accelerating the decay of materials built for an enclosed, humid environment. Chichibu Mine itself continued limited crystalline limestone operations until 30 September 2022, more than four centuries after gold mining was first recorded at this site in 1608. The bathhouse records an older end: the point at which the community that once surrounded the mine simply ceased to exist.