Jirochofuji And Mabutanohaha

Paired hand-painted billboards fill the upper facade of a shuttered shopfront on the Yubari Kinema Kaido, the city's hand-painted cinema street. They advertise the films Jirochou Fuji and Mabuta no Haha. Corrugated roll-down shutters cover the full width of the ground level, a utility pole throws a long diagonal shadow across the asphalt, and overhead wires cross the frame. The painted surfaces are worn, marked by decades of Hokkaido winters and the particular kind of neglect that comes after a city has lost most of its reason to stay occupied. Coal was discovered in the Yubari basin in 1888, when geologist Ichitaro Ban, a protege of American surveyor Benjamin Smith Lyman, identified the major seam that would define the city. Mining commenced between 1890 and 1892 under the Hokkaido Colliery and Railway Company, and the industry grew for most of the century that followed. The workforce across the city's mines peaked at close to 19,500 miners in 1953. At that point, Yubari was a functioning industrial city of more than 100,000 people. Japan's shift from coal to oil began around 1960 and the mines closed one by one through the following three decades. The last, Mitsubishi Minami-Oyubari Mine, closed on 30 March 1990. In the years between peak population and closure, the city lost more than 80,000 residents. By the 2000 national census, 14,791 people remained. In 2007, Yubari filed for fiscal rehabilitation with a debt of approximately 35.3 billion yen. In 2010, the national census recorded 10,922 residents. What the photograph records is the weight of that arc on a shopfront that closed and a pair of painted boards that stayed up. The billboards are still there. The city around them, its mines sealed, its workforce dispersed, its tourism gamble long since spent, continues in a reduced form. As of March 2026, approximately 5,707 people remain.