Public Toilet

This public toilet stands on a street in Yubari, Hokkaido, its weathered facade reflecting the slow deterioration that has come to define much of the city's built fabric. The structure is closed, its surfaces worn by successive Hokkaido winters, the kind of building that gets forgotten precisely because it was once so ordinary. Yubari's story begins with coal. Mining commenced in the 1890s under the Hokkaido Colliery and Railway Company, and by 1960 the city held a census population of 107,972. At its mid-century peak, between 24 and 30 mines operated across the basin, employing roughly 19,500 miners at the workforce's height in 1953. The shift away from coal to oil began in 1960, and the industry contracted steadily across the following three decades. The last mine, Mitsubishi Minami-Oyubari, closed on 30 March 1990. The city had already staked its recovery on tourism, constructing the Sekitan no Rekishi Mura history village and theme park complex between 1978 and 1983, and later opening Hotel Mount Racey in January 1991. The tourist economy never generated the revenue the debt required. On 6 March 2007, Yubari officially filed for fiscal rehabilitation, carrying a debt of approximately 35.3 billion yen. It remains the only city in modern Japan to have done so. The measures that followed were immediate and severe: public toilets across the city were closed permanently, among the first municipal services cut as part of the reconstruction plan. This photograph, made in 2016, records what that decision looks like seventeen years on. The toilet block has not been demolished, but it has not been maintained either. Yubari's winters do the rest. Snow load, freeze-thaw cycles, and water ingress work steadily on any unheated structure. The weathered walls here are not dramatic; they are the ordinary result of a building no longer worth keeping.