Fukinoto

Petasites japonicus, known in Japanese as fukinoto, grows through bitumen, concrete, and abandoned lots across Yubari's streetscapes each spring. In Hokkaido culture it carries a specific significance: it is the first plant to push up after snowmelt, the signal that winter has ended. In a city where most streets are quiet for most of the year, its reappearance is one of the more reliable signs of change. This photograph was made in April 2016, at Hon-cho 4-chome in Yubari-shi, central Hokkaido, approximately 60 kilometres east of Sapporo. The shoots push up in the early cold, their pale yellow-green flower heads still tight against the chill, before the snow has fully cleared. The shoots are also edible, commonly battered and fried in tempura. Yubari's history is inseparable from coal. Mining commenced in the Yubari basin in the early 1890s under the Hokkaido Colliery and Railway Company, following the discovery of the region's 24-shaku coal seam in 1888. At the city's peak in 1960, the national census recorded 107,972 residents. The workforce at the mines numbered around 19,500 at its highest point, in 1953. By 1990, the last coal mine had closed. By the time of Yubari's fiscal rehabilitation filing in March 2007, the debt stood at approximately 35.3 billion yen. The city's population continued to fall through the decades that followed. The buildings left behind after that contraction are what the Streetscapes of Yubari series records. Timber-frame worker housing, commercial shopfronts with their signage still up, concrete public housing blocks with boarded windows. In Hokkaido winters, unoccupied structures absorb snowfall without any means of managing the load. Roofs buckle. Timber frames rot. Every winter reshapes the streetscape further. Fukinoto grows through all of it. The plant does not distinguish between a maintained footpath and a cracked slab where a building once stood. It comes back regardless. In a city where the population has fallen by more than 94% from its peak, that persistence is not nothing.