Shimizusawa Seiei Cho

Shimizusawa Seiei-cho sits within the Shimizusawa district of Yubari, a city of roughly 763 square kilometres in central Hokkaido, approximately 60 kilometres east of Sapporo. The street was built to house managers of the Yubari Shin coal mine, and it shows it. The dwellings here were constructed to a noticeably higher standard than the worker cottages elsewhere in the city, where internal partitions reportedly did not reach the roof and families shared cramped rooms in pre-war row housing. In Seiei-cho, the houses were larger and better made. They remain in noticeably better condition than the surrounding stock, and at least 1 dwelling still shows signs of occupation. Coal mining in Yubari began in the early 1890s under the Hokkaido Colliery and Railway Company, following the discovery of the Yubari coal basin in 1888. At its mid-twentieth century peak, the city supported between 24 and 30 operating mines and a registered population that reached approximately 116,908 in April 1960. Japan's shift from coal to oil began eroding that base almost immediately. The last mine in the city, the Mitsubishi Minami-Oyubari Mine, closed on 30 March 1990, ending a century of extraction. The population at that point had already fallen to 20,969. What followed was a failed attempt to replace coal with tourism, a tourism economy that accumulated debt the city could not service, and a fiscal rehabilitation filing on 6 March 2007 with debts of approximately 35.3 billion yen. By the 2020 national census, 7,334 people remained. This photograph, made in 2016, records the street as it stood 26 years after the last mine closed. Red and blue metal roofs form a tight geometric grid across the slope, arranged in parallel rows, the blue-roofed houses carrying light yellow facades and sitting apart from the surrounding stock. They are among the more intact pockets of the former coal-town streetscape, which is its own kind of record of a loss that took the better part of half a century to complete. The Streetscapes of Yubari series documents the built fabric of that process across the city.