The Strata of Time

Maki Elementary School is closing in 2025, the same year it celebrated its 150th anniversary. Its dwindling student body was merged with another school. The parents and guardians have welcomed the transition, but they also feel a sense of mourning. (Archival photo provided by Hiromu Saeki.)

Japan of the 2020s—who could have seen it coming? Even in the 1950s and ‘60s, as the country rapidly grew to claim a place among the strongest nations in the world, the twin issues of depopulation and overcrowding had already begun to take root. Mountain towns watched as younger residents drained away, leaving for big cities and factory jobs. During those first exhilarating decades, towns in the San’in region grew to the largest they’d ever been. In the years since, their populations have shrunk by half.

The Sanin region has been a center of iron production since at least the eighth century, and between the 1600s and 1800s, towns like Unnan and Okuizumo clamored with the sound of tatara forges. But as the country boomed in the twentieth century, industrial steel mills sprung up in Sanyō, on the opposite side of the mountains. A wave of urbanization came with them.
Every generation of every community emerges from the one before it. Each era has its own sights and sounds——its own landscapes. Having visited both sides of the mountains, I went looking for those past landscapes, hidden though they were beneath the everyday tableaus of these formerly bustling towns.

The Tanabe family has been involved in steel production in Okuizumo for some 500 years. Their storehouses still line the street where the town once gathered to create a massive ball of mochi in celebration of the patriarch’s 88th birthday. Today, the family has taken on the task of attracting visitors and bringing life back to Okuizumo. (Archival photo provided by Yoshida Exchange Center.)

Iron sand, a crucial component of steel smelting, was taken from the surrounding mountains. When the excavation ended, the land was repurposed as fields for growing buckwheat or turned into pastures where horses and cows could graze. This sustainable industry helped birth Nita Rice, one of Okuizumo’s famed local exports. (Archival photo provided by Shungo Shishido and Mizawa Community Center.)

Until the prefectural Water Pollution Control Act of 1970, excavated waste rock was dumped into the Hiikawa River. The accrued sediment raised the riverbed ever higher, and with it came the risk of a disastrous flood. A dam was built upstream to alleviate the problem. (Archival photo provided by Hiroshi Hashimoto.)

Even as the economy surged, more and more factories were relocated to the coast of the Inner Sea. In 1960, it was the city of Fukuyama, in Hiroshima Prefecture, that became home to the largest steel manufacturer in the world (today JFE Steel Corporation). Steelworkers and engineers gathered there from throughout the western regions. In 1962, the city of Fukuyama estimated that over the coming decade, its population would double, revenue would sextuple, and industrial output would increase by a factor of ten.

The steel mill adopted cutting-edge technology in the name of increased quality and efficiency. It produced more raw steel than any other mill in the country, and by 2013, its output totaled 400 million metric tons. (Archival photo provided by JFE Steel Corporation.)

To accommodate the newly arriving steelworkers and their families, the mountains were leveled for plot after plot of company housing. Today, those complexes are gone, replaced by a sprawl of single-family houses. (Archival photo provided by Isegaoka Elementary School.)

The first step in opening the steel mill had been the creation of a new, man-made island in the bay. For some locals, the changing landscape conjured a wistful sense of loss. (Archival photo provided by Takayoshi Nagai.)

During the boom, the trains that tracked to and from the cities of the Sanyō region were thronged with passengers. Today, a luxury sleeper called the Twilight Express Mizukaze carries well-to-do travelers along that route. (Archival photo provided by Kaneyuki Fujimoto.)

Images like these show how “progress” can involve both loss and gain, and neither is easy to predict. In these uncertain times, is there any hope of determining the future?

“The true Logic for this world is the Calculus of Probabilities, which takes account of the magnitude of the probability (which is, or ought to be in a reasonable man’s mind).”
—Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879)

So Maxwell said, but merely measuring shrinking populations and rising ages will not address the problems these communities face. It is the residents themselves who seek out new ways of breathing life back into their towns, and a formula that succeeds in one place may not work in another. From one era to the next, each community exists in a continuum, reinventing itself again and again in search of a better future.
In that sense, each landscape is the outcome of the hopes and desires of those who came before us. But no one can say what new landscapes may unfold, or whether, upon peeling back the tableaus before us, the memories we find there will be light or dark.

With the shift to automotives and Yasugi’s declining population, both freight and passenger fares dwindled, spelling the end for the Hirose Railroad. Now, the world-famous gardens at the Adachi Museum of Art lie a short way away. (Archival photo provided by Iwao Yamamoto.)

The challenges faced by these communities go beyond the economic stagnation of a shrinking population. The damage caused by one particular animal also weighs heavily on their minds.
“There’s no coexisting with them. It’s war, plain and simple. War.” This is how a Nita rice farmer described the problem, and it’s easy to understand why. Even I felt enmity rising in my chest when I saw the ransacked fields, just days from harvest, that had been visited in the night by a merciless pack of wild boar.

Left untended, the fields and gardens of abandoned houses attract still more boar and other wild animals. In this way, the town is at risk of being slowly subsumed by the surrounding wilderness. For the remaining residents, the upkeep is a daunting task.
Placing a night-vision camera at the edge of one overgrown garden, I captured countless photos of wild intruders. Night after night, a sow brought her piglets to devour the persimmons, and they were joined by tanuki, foxes, weasels, and hares. What was once a human residence had become a den of animals.