Suntory

A green fascia bearing the SUNTORY name in white raised lettering spans the upper half of a rendered commercial building in Shimizusawa, one of Yubari's principal districts. Three rolled metal shutters close off the ground floor. Two small cars sit on cracked asphalt below. The building operated as a liquor distribution outlet, one of many commercial premises that once served Yubari's working population. Yubari is in central Hokkaido, roughly 60 kilometres east of Sapporo. Coal was discovered in the basin in 1888, and by the middle of the twentieth century the city supported over 107,000 residents and a workforce of around 19,500 miners. At its height, between 24 and 30 mines were operating in the area. Businesses of every kind followed the population: shops, clinics, dealerships, bars, and distributors supplying the households of a major industrial city. The shift from coal to oil as Japan's primary energy source began in 1960. Mines closed progressively through the following three decades. The last coal mine in Yubari, the Mitsubishi Minami-Oyubari Mine, closed on 30 March 1990, ending a century of extraction. The population had already fallen to around 20,000 by then, and it kept falling. Yubari filed for fiscal rehabilitation on 6 March 2007, carrying debt of approximately 35.3 billion yen, becoming the only city in modern Japan to do so. By 2016, when this photograph was made, fewer than 10,000 people remained. The commercial infrastructure built for a city of 107,000 now serves a fraction of that number. The SUNTORY fascia remains legible. The shutters are down. Part of the Streetscapes of Yubari series.