Shrine Stairway

The stone steps in this photograph lead to Ishikiri-Yubari Shrine, a site the research file records as once served by a cable car running up the left side of the hill. The staircase itself is the older approach: worn stone treads with vegetation pressing in from both sides, the path narrowed by growth that advances a little further each season. Yubari sits in a mountainous basin in central Hokkaido, around 60 kilometres east of Sapporo. Coal was discovered in the Yubari basin in 1888, and commercial mining began between 1890 and 1892. At the industry's peak in the early 1960s, the city's registered population approached 117,000 and roughly 19,500 miners worked the seams. The national census for 1960 recorded 107,972 residents. Japan's shift from coal to oil began that same year. The mines closed one by one over the following three decades. The last, Mitsubishi Minami-Oyubari, shut on 30 March 1990. The city attempted a pivot to tourism through the 1980s and 1990s, borrowing heavily to build theme parks, hotels, and festival infrastructure. The gamble did not pay off. In March 2007 Yubari filed for fiscal rehabilitation with debts of approximately 35.3 billion yen, becoming the only city in modern Japan to do so. By the time Brett photographed these streets in 2016, fewer than 13,000 people remained. The city's population stood at approximately 5,707 as of March 2026. In unoccupied buildings across Yubari, Hokkaido's winters do most of the demolition work. Several metres of snow accumulate each season; in unheated structures the weight buckles roofs and drives water through timber frames. The overgrowth pressing against these shrine steps follows the same logic, filling space that is no longer cleared. The cable car that once carried visitors up the hill is gone. The steps remain.