Faded model names, Bluebird, Cedric, Sunny, Pulsar and Gloria, run along a horizontal sign above broken windows on the former Nissan dealership in Yubari. Rusted roller shutters line the left of the facade beneath a red corrugated iron roof, and an open doorway at the centre reveals a dark interior. Cracked asphalt fills the foreground where cars once stood. The building sits opposite the former Yubari Driving School.
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Faded model names, Bluebird, Cedric, Sunny, Pulsar and Gloria, run along a horizontal sign above broken windows on the former Nissan dealership in Yubari. Rusted roller shutters line the left of the facade beneath a red corrugated iron roof, and an open doorway at the centre reveals a dark interior. Cracked asphalt fills the foreground where cars once stood. The building sits opposite the former Yubari Driving School. Yubari, in central Hokkaido, was built on coal. The Hokkaido Colliery and Railway Company began extraction in the early 1890s, and by 1960 the city held a census population of 107,972. It supported 24 to 30 operating mines at its mid-century peak, along with the full commercial infrastructure that a city of that size requires: schools, hospitals, hotels, cinemas, shopping streets, and dealerships. A car dealership on a Yubari street in 1960 was an ordinary thing. Japan's energy policy shifted from coal to oil from 1960 onward. Mines closed across the Sorachi coalfield through the 1970s and 1980s. The last mine in Yubari, the Mitsubishi Minami-Oyubari Mine, closed on 30 March 1990, ending a century of extraction. The city had borrowed heavily through the 1980s to fund a tourism pivot: theme parks, ski infrastructure, hotels. The visitors never arrived in sufficient numbers. On 6 March 2007, Yubari filed for fiscal rehabilitation, carrying debt of approximately 35.3 billion yen. It was the only city in modern Japan to do so. Businesses across Yubari's commercial strips closed in the years surrounding the filing. The research file for this series documents intact shuttered premises along the Honcho shopping street and adjacent roads: dental clinics, haberdasheries, a driving school, a gas station. The Nissan dealership sits among them, its signage still legible above the shutters. By the time this photograph was made in 2016, Yubari's population had fallen below 10,000. The physical record of the city's commercial life remains largely intact because there was no economic reason to remove it. This print is from the Streetscapes of Yubari series.
04·FROM THE FIELD NOTES
Faded model names, Bluebird, Cedric, Sunny, Pulsar and Gloria, run along a horizontal sign above broken windows on the former Nissan dealership in Yubari.
Brett Patman
The series
Streetscapes of Yubari
2018 · 54
photographs
Yūbari is a coal-mining city in central Hokkaido. Founded in 1943, its population peaked at around 120,000 in the 1960s and now sits at about 6,400. The colliery closed in the 1980s. The city's attempt to recover through tourism failed; in 2007 it became the first Japanese municipality to declare bankruptcy, owing 35.3 billion yen. These streetscapes were taken between the houses, shops, and schools the town no longer needs - most empty, some half-collapsed, some still in use by the people who stayed.
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