Matsuya

The Matsuya building stands on a street in Yubari, Hokkaido, its faded signage still legible above a shuttered entrance that has not opened for trade in some time. The facade is intact. The surrounding street is quiet in a way that would have been unrecognisable to anyone who knew the city at its peak. Yubari was built on coal. Mining commenced in the basin in the early 1890s under the Hokkaido Colliery and Railway Company, and the population that grew around those operations reached 107,972 in the 1960 national census. At that point, between 24 and 30 mines were operating across the city. The commercial strips, the shopfronts, the buildings like Matsuya, existed to serve a workforce and their families measured in the tens of thousands. Japan's energy policy shifted from coal to oil after 1960, and Yubari's mines began closing in sequence. The last operating coal mine, Mitsubishi Minami-Oyubari, closed on 30 March 1990. The century of coal mining that had built the city was over. The population, already declining for decades, continued to fall. By 2000 it stood at 14,791. By the time of Brett Patman's 2016 visit, it was below 12,000 and still falling. The city's fiscal difficulties compounded the demographic ones. Yubari had borrowed heavily through the 1980s and 1990s to fund tourism infrastructure intended to replace coal as the economic base. The strategy did not generate enough revenue to cover the borrowing. On 6 March 2007, Yubari became the only city in modern Japan to file for fiscal rehabilitation under the Local Finance Rehabilitation Act, carrying debts of approximately 35.3 billion yen. What the 2016 photograph records is the physical consequence of that long sequence: a building still standing, its signage still present, on a street that has lost most of the city around it.