Ticket Centre

The cylindrical tower at the entrance to the Coal Mining History Village is one of the more architecturally distinct structures in Yubari. Timber shingles wrap its curved exterior; a geodesic copper dome caps it. Beside it, a low building with a red pitched roof and peeling teal doors sits against cracked and stained asphalt, bare hills rising behind. The complex it served was constructed between 1978 and 1983 as Yubari's deliberate attempt to replace an economy built on coal with one built on visitors. By 1960 the city had reached a population of around 107,972 people, almost all connected in some way to the mines. The energy policy shift from coal to oil that followed brought the industry into a slow decline that accelerated through the 1970s and 1980s as mines closed one after another. The Coal Mining History Village, known in Japanese as Sekitan no Rekishi Mura, was the centrepiece of a plan to make Yubari a tourist destination. The Coal Mine Museum component opened in July 1980, eventually incorporating the original pit head and an accessible mine shaft. The broader theme park ran alongside it for two decades, with amusement rides and attractions drawing visitors to what had recently been a working coal city. After Yubari filed for fiscal rehabilitation in March 2007, carrying a debt of around 35.3 billion yen, the economics of maintaining the complex collapsed entirely. Around 2008, the amusement park rides were dismantled and the Robot Science Museum pulled down. The Coal Mine Museum was retained as a smaller facility and continues to operate today, transitioning in 2013 to a local cultural facility managed by the Mining Memory Promotion Project NPO. The ticket centre that once stood between visitors and all of that did not survive the cut. This photograph, made in 2016, records what it became: a copper dome over empty asphalt, teal paint lifting from timber, the hills behind unchanged.