Yandume Dental Clinic

Yandume Dental Clinic presents a two-storey concrete facade under flat overcast sky, the blue entrance canopy still carrying Japanese characters above heavy timber double doors. Some windows are covered with crumpled reflective panels, others left open to the weather. A single brick chimney rises from the roofline to the right. The building looks less like a place that was closed than a place that was simply stopped. It stood in Yubari's commercial streetscape, among the dental clinics, haberdasheries, driving schools and car dealerships that once served a functioning city. Remnants of large-format photographic panels flanked the entrance on either side when this photograph was taken in 2016. The forces that closed the clinic were set in motion decades earlier. Coal had been mined in the Yubari basin since the early 1890s, and by 1960 the city held around 107,972 residents, a workforce built almost entirely around the mines. Then Japan's energy policy shifted from coal to oil, and the industry began its long contraction. The last coal mine in Yubari, the Mitsubishi Minami-Oyubari Mine, closed on 30 March 1990. By the 2010 national census, the population had fallen to 10,922. By 2020, it was 7,334. The city that remained could no longer sustain the full range of services built for a city of over 100,000 people. In 2007, Yubari became the only city in modern Japan to file for fiscal rehabilitation, carrying a debt of approximately 35.3 billion yen accumulated through failed attempts to replace coal with tourism. Schools were consolidated. Public services were cut. Businesses closed. What this photograph records is one frontage in that broader accounting: a clinic built for patients who, over the course of a few decades, were no longer there to need it.