Snack Bar Elite

The sign for Snack Bar Elite is the most legible thing left about this building. The corrugated iron cladding has rusted into deep streaks of orange and brown. The windows are gone. What remains of the roof has buckled under years of accumulated snow load, the primary mechanism of structural failure in Yubari's unoccupied buildings. Each unheated winter drives the process further: snow accumulates, the roof flexes, water enters the timber frame, and by spring the building is measurably closer to collapse than it was the previous autumn. Yubari sits in a mountainous basin in central Hokkaido, approximately 60 kilometres east of Sapporo. Coal was discovered in the basin in 1888, and by the mid-twentieth century the city held a registered population of roughly 116,908. The 1960 national census recorded 107,972 residents. Mining employed around 19,500 workers at its peak in 1953, and the commercial streetscape that grew up to serve them included bars, restaurants, haberdasheries, dental clinics, and small venues like this one. The last coal mine in Yubari, the Mitsubishi Minami-Oyubari Mine, closed on 30 March 1990. The city attempted a pivot to tourism through the 1980s and 1990s, borrowing heavily to build theme parks, ski infrastructure, and hotels. The strategy did not generate sufficient revenue, and in March 2007 Yubari filed for fiscal rehabilitation under Japan's Local Finance Rehabilitation Act, carrying a debt of approximately 35.3 billion yen. It remains the only city in modern Japan to have done so. By the 2010 national census the population had fallen to 10,922. By 2020 it was 7,334. The commercial premises that once served a city of more than 100,000 now line largely empty streets. Snack Bar Elite, photographed in 2016, is one of them: sign still up, interior returning to weather, the corrugated iron doing what corrugated iron does when nobody is left to maintain it.