Yubari Backstreet

A narrow road runs between a two-storey timber-clad building and a rendered shopfront in Yubari, grass pushing through at the kerb edge. Utility poles line the street and a steep, vegetated hillside fills the background. No people are present. The scene is unremarkable by any ordinary measure, which is part of what makes it worth looking at. Yubari City sits in a mountainous basin in central Hokkaido, roughly 60 kilometres east of Sapporo. Coal was discovered in the Yubari basin in 1888, and commercial extraction began shortly after under the Hokkaido Colliery and Railway Company. For the better part of a century, the city expanded to accommodate the workforce the industry required. The single- and two-storey timber-frame dwellings visible throughout Yubari's streets, their walls clad in painted weatherboards or corrugated steel, were built in large numbers between the 1920s and 1960s to house miners and their families. The city reached peak population in 1960 at 107,972 people, the same year Japan's energy policy began its shift from coal to oil. Mines closed across the following three decades. The last coal mine in Yubari, the Mitsubishi Minami-Oyubari Mine, closed on 30 March 1990. The city attempted a pivot to tourism through the 1980s and 1990s, borrowing heavily to build theme parks and hotels. That bet did not pay off. Yubari filed for fiscal rehabilitation on 6 March 2007 carrying a debt of approximately 35.3 billion yen, making it the only city in modern Japan to have done so. By the 2010 national census the population stood at 10,922. By 2020 it had fallen further to 7,334. The city estimate for March 2026 puts the figure at approximately 5,707. This photograph, made in 2016, records a street that looks as though it could belong to any small Hokkaido town. The timber cladding, the rendered render, the poles and wires, the hill behind. Yubari looked like this everywhere once. Now the same street, in most parts of the city, would have fewer buildings left standing.