Random Harvest

Yubari sits in a mountain basin in central Hokkaido, roughly 60 kilometres east of Sapporo. Coal was discovered in the area in 1888, and mining operations began under the Hokkaido Colliery and Railway Company in the early 1890s. By the 1960 national census, the city's population had reached 107,972. At that peak, dozens of mines were operating across the basin, and the streets that are now empty with weeds pushing through the bitumen were busy with workers, families, shopkeepers, and the everyday activity of a functioning industrial city. The energy transition from coal to oil that Japan undertook through the 1960s began the long contraction. Mines closed one after another across the following three decades. The last coal mine in Yubari, Mitsubishi Minami-Oyubari Mine, closed on 30 March 1990, ending a century of extraction. The population had already fallen sharply and continued falling after the mines went quiet. In 2007, Yubari filed for fiscal rehabilitation with debts of approximately 35.3 billion yen, becoming the only city in modern Japan to do so. Municipal services were cut, public infrastructure was left unheated and unmaintained, and buildings that no longer had occupants faced Hokkaido's winters without repair. Several metres of annual snowfall, and the roof loads it generates, are the primary mechanism by which unoccupied buildings in Yubari deteriorate. Each winter reshapes the streetscape a little further. This photograph, made in 2016, records a street where the buildings are still standing but the street itself has largely returned to vegetation. It is one image in the Streetscapes of Yubari series, which documents the urban fabric of a city working through the long aftermath of industrial closure, fiscal collapse, and a 94% decline from its peak population.