Bottles railways single-room shelters in a landscape

single-room shelters in a landscape that demanded practicality above everything else

The sanitorium operated continuously from 1903 until May 1999

light filtering through grimy windows onto forgotten equipment

The building sits within a residential and commercial streetscape shaped as much by decades of cold winters as by the economics that emptied it

A heavy door handle inside West Ryde Pumping Station

Bottles railways single-room shelters in a landscapeGlass bottles line a wooden shelf inside one of the Ogurawa settlement's crumbling structures, left behind when the last resident walked out in September 2006. Chichibu Mine and the company town built around it sustained families for decades before metal extraction ceased in 1978 and the settlement slowly emptied. Part of the Nichitsu Mining Village series.