Gift Shop

The gift shop sits on a cracked car park in Yubari, Hokkaido, its white facade painted with cartoon murals that once flagged it as a place worth stopping at. The birch trees behind the roofline are bare. The car park is empty. The sky is the flat grey of a Hokkaido winter easing toward spring. Yubari was a coal city. At its peak in 1960, the national census recorded 107,972 people living here, supported by an industry that had run continuously since the early 1890s. The last mine, Mitsubishi Minami-Oyubari, closed on 30 March 1990, ending a century of extraction. The city's response was to pivot to tourism: the Coal Mining History Village theme park was constructed between 1978 and 1983, and the broader push through the 1980s and 1990s produced hotels, ski infrastructure, and roadside retail built to intercept visitors who, in sufficient numbers, never came. The tourism gamble accumulated debt that the city could not service. Yubari filed for fiscal rehabilitation on 6 March 2007 with debts of approximately 35.3 billion yen, becoming the only city in modern Japan to enter that process. The physical infrastructure of the tourism era, the ticket booths, the souvenir shops, the mascot-branded welcome signs, remained standing after the money ran out. The 2020 national census counted 7,334 residents. The 2010 census had recorded 10,922. The arithmetic plays out in the streetscapes: shuttered shopfronts, concrete slabs where buildings once stood, and places like this one, its murals still bright against the white paint, its car park returning slowly to gravel and weed. The cartoon characters on the wall were designed to make a city look like a place worth visiting. In 2016, they were doing that job for a different kind of audience.