Snowmobile

A Yamaha VK540 snowmobile rests on bare gravel in front of a low prefabricated building in Yubari, Hokkaido. The seat cover is split along its length. Dry scrub crowds the hillside behind the structure. There is no snow. Yubari receives several metres of snowfall each winter, and the weight of accumulated snow is the primary cause of structural failure in the city's many unoccupied buildings. Roofs buckle, water drives into timber frames, and each unheated winter pushes abandoned structures closer to collapse. A snowmobile in a place like this is not an unusual piece of equipment. Yubari-shi was incorporated as a city on 1 April 1943. At its peak in 1960, the national census recorded 107,972 residents supported almost entirely by coal mining, with between 24 and 30 mines operating across the mountain basin. The last mine, Mitsubishi Minami-Oyubari, closed on 30 March 1990. The city's subsequent pivot to tourism, financed through borrowing, produced debts of approximately 35.3 billion yen and a fiscal rehabilitation filing on 6 March 2007. By March 2026, roughly 5,707 residents remained. The prefabricated building behind the snowmobile is consistent with the "improved housing" estates built in Yubari from the mid-1970s onward: low-profile, steel-clad, practical. The architectural character of the city is post-war Hokkaido mining-town vernacular, built for function and population numbers that no longer exist. Photographed in 2016, from the Streetscapes of Yubari series.