Death Wish

A street in Yubari, Hokkaido. A billboard bearing the names Charles Bronson and Hotel Shuparo covers the front face of a red-roofed A-frame building on a gentle incline, a white guardrail following the paved rise in the foreground and a weatherboard building with a rooftop antenna on the lot to the right. Bare trees and utility poles line the street behind, under flat overcast sky. The buildings are still standing, still legible, but the people who would have read the signs and pushed through the doors are largely gone. Coal was found in the Yubari basin in 1888. The Hokkaido Colliery and Railway Company began extraction between 1890 and 1892, and a railway line opened in 1892 to carry coal to the port of Muroran. A city grew around the industry. By April 1960, the registered population sat at approximately 116,900. The 1960 national census recorded 107,972 residents. Then Japan shifted its energy policy from coal to oil, and the long decline began. Mine after mine closed across the following decades. The last operating coal mine in Yubari, Mitsubishi Minami-Oyubari Mine, shut on 30 March 1990, ending a century of extraction. The population continued to fall as workers and families left for other parts of Hokkaido and beyond. The 2000 national census counted 14,791 residents. The 2010 national census counted 10,922. In 2007, Yubari filed for fiscal rehabilitation with debts of approximately 35.3 billion yen, the result of a failed tourism pivot in the 1980s and 1990s that borrowed heavily to build theme parks and hotels which never attracted enough visitors to cover costs. The city became Japan's only municipally bankrupt city. What remained in 2016 was a commercial streetscape in the process of being quietly returned to stillness. Signs still name businesses that have not operated for years. The buildings hold their shape against the Hokkaido winters, though the snow load that buckles unheated roofs will eventually have its say. This photograph records the street as it stood.