Kenko Kaikan

Kenko Kaikan, whose name translates roughly as "health hall," was the workers' health centre for the Shimizusawa coal mine. The concrete arch above its entrance still carries the characters 健康会館, and fire-hazard signage remains on the adjacent wall, two details that speak to what the building once was and how seriously its operators treated the business of keeping miners functional. It sits on a quiet Yubari street, repurposed for storage now, its windows broken and its paintwork coming away from the facade in broad, curling sheets. Yubari was a coal city first and everything else second. Coal was discovered in the basin in 1888 and mining commenced under the Hokkaido Colliery and Railway Company in the early 1890s. By 1960 the city held over 107,000 residents and supported roughly 24 to 30 operating mines. The Shimizusawa area, a few kilometres from the city centre, was home to its own mining operations, its own railway infrastructure, and facilities like Kenko Kaikan built to serve the workforce that kept it running. The mines closed progressively from the 1970s. The last coal mine in Yubari, the Mitsubishi Minami-Oyubari Mine, closed on 30 March 1990. The city attempted to replace the mining economy with tourism through the 1980s and 1990s, accumulated debt in the process, and filed for fiscal rehabilitation on 6 March 2007 with liabilities of approximately 35.3 billion yen. Population by that point had already fallen below 13,000. It stands at roughly 5,707 as of early 2026. Kenko Kaikan was photographed in 2016, when Yubari was nine years into a rehabilitation plan and most of its outlying districts were well advanced in the process of being left behind. The broken windows and peeling paint visible in this photograph are partly the result of that economic history, and partly the result of Hokkaido winters: several metres of snow, unheated buildings, and structural timber that has no chance of surviving both.