Sidestreet

A narrow sidestreet cuts into the quiet interior of Yubari, power lines crossing overhead in a dense web against a flat grey sky. Timber-frame buildings line both sides of the path, their facades clad in corrugated steel that has rusted and stained over decades. The road is empty. No pedestrians, no vehicles. The scene is not unusual for Yubari; it is the normal condition of much of the city. Yubari is a coal city in central Hokkaido, located around 60 kilometres east of Sapporo in the Sorachi Subprefecture. Coal mining commenced in the 1890s under the Hokkaido Colliery and Railway Company. By 1960, the registered population had reached around 116,908, with the national census recording 107,972 residents that year. At the height of the industry, around 19,500 miners worked across the city's mines. The timber-frame dwellings that line this sidestreet are typical of the housing built for mining families between the 1920s and 1960s. Walls clad in corrugated steel or painted timber weatherboards were standard construction across the residential areas. In occupied and heated buildings, Hokkaido's heavy winter snowfall is managed. In unoccupied ones, the accumulated weight buckles roofs and drives water into the timber frame, accelerating structural failure year on year. Every winter reshapes what remains. The last coal mine in Yubari, Mitsubishi Minami-Oyubari Mine, closed on 30 March 1990, ending a century of extraction. By the 1990 national census, the population had fallen to 20,969. In 2007, Yubari filed for fiscal rehabilitation with a debt of around 35.3 billion yen, the only city in modern Japan to have done so. The population recorded in this photograph's capture year of 2016 was continuing its long decline toward the approximately 5,707 residents counted in March 2026. This photograph is part of the Streetscapes of Yubari series.