Seven Samurai

On the upper storey of a white clapboard building on a wet Yubari street, a large hand-painted billboard advertises Shichinin no Samurai, with Japanese text naming Akira Kurosawa as director legible beneath the title. Below it, the ground-floor window is covered entirely in political flyers. The building stands on a rain-slicked road, its paintwork worn, the street otherwise empty. The billboard is one of many painted across private residences, shopfronts, and vacant lots throughout Yubari City as part of Yubari Kinema Kaido, a designated cinema street whose signage carries the Cinegger bee mascot. The practice of painting film signboards directly onto the city's built fabric grew out of the Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival, which launched in February 1990, the same year the last coal mine in the city closed. Other films documented on facades throughout the city include Die Hard, South Pacific, Random Harvest, Kurobe no Taiyo, Jirochou Fuji, and Mabuta no Haha. The festival was part of a broader attempt to replace coal with tourism as the city's economic base. That strategy, pursued through the 1980s and 1990s with borrowed money, ultimately failed. Yubari filed for fiscal rehabilitation on 6 March 2007 with debts of approximately 35.3 billion yen. The festival was cancelled that year and revived the following year under community sponsorship. What the Kurosawa billboard records is the residue of that pivot. The film itself has nothing to do with Yubari. But the act of painting it onto the side of a clapboard building in a severely depopulated Hokkaido city, and leaving it there through decades of snowfall and rain, gives it a different kind of weight. The photograph was made in 2016, when Yubari's population had fallen to around a tenth of its 1960 peak of approximately 107,972.