House

The upper storey of this two-storey timber house is wrapped in corrugated steel panels, rusted to a deep orange-brown. Below, blue paint peels from the lower walls in long strips, exposing the timber beneath. Bare branches press against the facade. Broken timber and debris pile at the front of the building. A single conifer stands alongside. The house is typical of the post-war mining-town vernacular documented throughout Yubari's streetscapes: timber-frame construction, corrugated steel or painted weatherboard cladding, built during the decades when coal drove everything in this part of central Hokkaido. Yubari sits in a mountainous basin around the Yubari River, roughly 60 kilometres east of Sapporo. Coal mining commenced in the 1890s under the Hokkaido Colliery and Railway Company. By the 1953 peak, the city's mines employed close to 19,500 workers. The registered population reached approximately 116,908 in April 1960. Housing followed workers into the basin in large numbers: company-provided row housing, private timber dwellings, and later concrete public apartment blocks, all built to shelter a population the city could not have imagined would one day leave almost entirely. Japan's shift from coal to oil from 1960 onward began the long contraction. Mine closures followed through the 1970s and 1980s. The last coal mine in Yubari, the Mitsubishi Minami-Oyubari Mine, closed on 30 March 1990. The population recorded in the 1990 national census was 20,969. Yubari filed for fiscal rehabilitation on 6 March 2007 with debts of approximately 35.3 billion yen. The mechanism of decay in Yubari's unoccupied buildings is largely climatic. Hokkaido winters deliver several metres of snow. In a heated, occupied building, that load is managed. In an abandoned one, it accumulates on the roof, buckles the structure, drives water into the timber frame, and accelerates collapse year on year. The corrugated steel cladding on this house has held its shape; the paintwork below has not. Each winter that passes without occupants pushes the building further along. This photograph was made in 2016 as part of the Streetscapes of Yubari series.