Hill View

Diagonal timber bracing props the upper corner of a heavily weathered wall in Yubari, Hokkaido, where rusted corrugated iron meets grey wooden siding under an overcast sky. Pipes and wires run along the base of the facade. Sparse branches in the foreground partially frame a valley below, where blue and grey rooftops step down through the hillside towards a forested ridgeline. No people are visible. These dwellings are the physical residue of a city built almost entirely on coal. Commercial extraction began in the early 1890s under the Hokkaido Colliery and Railway Company, and for most of the twentieth century Yubari was one of the most productive coalfields in Japan. At peak, the city ran between 24 and 30 operating mines. Its population reached 107,972 at the 1960 national census. Japan's energy policy shifted from coal to oil through the 1960s, and the mines began to close one by one. The last, Mitsubishi Minami-Oyubari Mine, closed on 30 March 1990. The population had been in steep decline for three decades by then. Mining company housing, built to accommodate workers and their families, began to empty. Timber frames left unheated through Hokkaido winters accumulate snow load on their roofs, and without maintenance the weight buckles structures inward season by season. Corrugated steel cladding rusts. Painted weatherboards fade and split. In March 2007, Yubari filed for fiscal rehabilitation under Japan's Local Finance Rehabilitation Act, the only city in modern Japan to do so. By the 2010 national census, the population stood at 10,922. By 2020 it had fallen to 7,334. The city's current estimate for March 2026 is approximately 5,707 residents, with people aged 65 and over comprising more than half that number. This photograph was made in 2016. The building it records still stands. It may not for much longer. Every unheated winter narrows the margin.