Stairway

This stairway climbs through a timber-frame building in Yubari City, central Hokkaido, its walls stripped back to bare plaster and layered in peeling paint, dust settled across the treads as though no one has passed in years. The structure is typical of the residential and commercial fabric built across Yubari during the coal-mining era: timber-frame construction, modest dimensions, the kind of building raised quickly during a period of rapid population growth and maintained only as long as the industry that filled it kept running. Yubari's coalfields were first identified in 1888 and commercial extraction began in the early 1890s under the Hokkaido Colliery and Railway Company. By the 1960 national census, the city's population had reached 107,972, supported by between 24 and 30 operating mines. Japan's shift from coal to oil began that same decade, and the population declined steadily from that point. Mine closures followed across the 1970s and 1980s, punctuated by a series of disasters that killed hundreds of workers. The last mine, Mitsubishi Minami-Oyubari, closed on 30 March 1990. The city filed for fiscal rehabilitation on 6 March 2007 with debts of approximately 35.3 billion yen, becoming the only city in modern Japan to do so. Services were cut, buildings left without maintenance, and the population continued to fall. In Yubari's winters, unoccupied and unheated buildings face snow loads of several metres. Roofs buckle, water enters the timber frame, and the structure deteriorates from the top down. This stairway, photographed in 2016, records that process mid-course: the fabric still standing, the occupation long gone. By the 2020 national census, fewer than 7,400 people remained in Yubari City. The stairway in this photograph stands as a record of a building that outlasted its purpose and is being slowly returned to the ground.