Wooden Panels

The lower facade of this two-storey building is covered in horizontal timber boards, each strip weathered to a flat grey, overlapping like the scales of something that has forgotten what it was protecting. Render clings to the upper walls in irregular patches, the rest gone to the ground below. Bare scrub has taken hold at the base. Snow falls lightly across the whole scene. Rusted metal sheets cover the lower left section of the upper storey, laid over broken concrete and horizontal timber planks in what reads as a sequence of repairs that eventually stopped. A diagonal white pipe drops from the roofline into a snowy embankment below, and a broken window above the patching exposes a dark interior. Timber-frame housing of this type was the dominant residential form across Yubari from the 1920s through the 1960s, constructed to house the workers and families drawn by the coal mines that once operated across the city's mountainous basin. At the industry's peak in 1960, over 107,000 people lived in Yubari. The coal seams that had drawn them were first identified in 1888, and mining commenced under the Hokkaido Colliery and Railway Company in the early 1890s. By the mid-twentieth century, between 24 and 30 mines were operating across the region. The last, Mitsubishi Minami-Oyubari Mine, closed on 30 March 1990. What the research file describes as "snow load as primary decay mechanism" is visible in Yubari's streetscapes everywhere, and this building is part of that record. Every unheated winter, the weight of accumulated snow buckles roofs, drives moisture into timber frames, and advances the structural clock. The buildings that held on through the 1990s and 2000s are losing ground to the climate as much as to economics. When this photograph was made in 2016, Yubari's population had already fallen below 10,000. The city had been under fiscal rehabilitation since 2007, carrying a debt of approximately 35.3 billion yen. The timber cladding in this frame is not remarkable by Yubari's standards. It is simply one more building doing what unoccupied buildings do in a Hokkaido winter.