Yubari är enorm spökstad, belägen i Japan. Staden är helt och hållet uppbyggd kring gruvindustrin som blomstrade på 50 och 60-talet. Alla stadens invånare arbetade i gruvan direkt eller indirekt. 1990 stängde den sista gruvan. Vid det laget hade redan större delen av stadens 116.000 invånare flyttat.
DN skrev en otroligt intressant artikel om Yubari för ett par månader sedan, med flera bra bilder. Fast av någon outgrundlig anledning har de tagit bort den.
Därför har jag försökt att pussla ihop en egen artikel från lite olika källor, främst hämtat från en blog av en amerikansk turist som besökte staden 2006.
Historian om Yubari är lika bizarr som den är fascinerande. Yubari achieved the status of city in 1943, and the population peaked at 116,908 in 1960. In that year, the region produced over three million tons of coal at 17 mines.
And then the Japanese government cut the floor out from under its coal industry. Realizing that cheaper coal could be imported from neighbors Australia and China.
By 1975, the population of Yubari had dropped by more than half to 50,000, while coal production had fallen even more sharply to one million tons, with only five mines still opened.
When the last coal mine in Yubari closed down in 1990, city elders thought pumping tax money into an amusement park, hall of fossils, ski resort and robot museum would keep this remote snowbound town of 13,000 people afloat and on the map. Instead of drawing the coveted tourists, the investments bankrupt the city and drew nationwide ridicule.
The woman at the front desk didn’t speak English, but she called over a young male co-worker from another part of the museum who spoke a little.
“This museum costs 800 yen,” he helpfully explained.
He then gave a very detailed explanation of what route to follow through the museum, even though the big arrows on the floors and walls made that pretty clear. He seemed quite concerned when he came to the part that the exit of the museum was located some distance from the entrance, and that it would require walking back to my car in the parking lot outside since the shuttle bus doesn’t run in the winter.
“That’s okay,” I explained, “I don’t have a car.”
“Oh!” he was shocked. “How did you come?”
“By train, then walking.”
More shocked looks, both from him and the woman as he explained to her what I had just said. There followed a mad rummaging of papers behind her desk, him entreating my patience until they found what it was they were looking for.
What they were looking for was the train schedule.
“The next train leaves Yubari at 16:22,” he explained with no small amount of consternation, pointing to the schedule.
It was just after 13:00, so it seemed I would have plenty of time to see the museum. Besides, there were trains at 18:17 and 19:24, too, if I wanted more time. Trying to reassure him, I pointed these out on the schedule.
“I don’t mind taking a later train if I need more time.”
That really threw him for a loop.
“No, no! You have plenty of time. You might spend one hour, maybe one and a half hours at most, in this museum.”
Apparently he was afraid I’d get bored waiting for that next train. Or maybe he didn’t want me to see anything of the town beyond the museum.
The second floor focused on the more local history of coalmining in Hokkaido, including several large, black & white photos of miners. The most striking was a poster-sized enlargement showing a naked miner scrubbing himself in the employee bathing room. His body was mostly clean, but his face was still coal-black.
More hints to the hard life of the mines came from the guidebook. Given what I've heard about Japanese tendancies to cover-up ugly pieces of history, I was surprised to find a section entitled, "The compulsory labor period of the world war II." It explained how during the war, with so many of their men off fighting, the Japanese brought Koreans and Chinese to Hokkaido and forced them work in the mines.
The wording was careful, despite the awkward grammer of the translation, but it could not hide vestiges of cruelty: "The many compulsory workers distributed to sites inside shafts that wasted by the defect of material and impossible production, forced to be engaged in dangerous works under the severe guard."
At the end of the second floor, I boarded an elevator to take me to the rest of the museum on the basement level.
Light and sound effects helped give the impression that I was riding several hundred feet below the surface, instead of just a few dozen. It was chilly when I stepped out, the constant, dank coolness of underground. The floors, walls and ceiling were dark and the lighting was sparse, coming only from widely spaced incandescent bulbs. Dioramas depicted the various stages of labor and mechanization in the mines.
The earliest miners, of the 1890s, wore only light clothing with sandals of rope on their feet. A model of a female miner stood with one of those practically bare feet in a pile of coal lumps as she wielded a pick-ax in her hands. Later miners wore safety boots, hardhats and respirators, and dug into the coal with big drilling machines.
In that section, motion sensors detected my presence and set into motion several machines and conveyor belts, creating a pounding, mechanic din in the otherwise deserted hallway. I shuddered at trying to imagine eight hours every day of listening to that.
From there, I donned a hardhat and headlamp, and stepped into a preserved mining shaft for the conclusion of the museum. More motion sensors switched single bulbs off and on as I passed, keeping the tunnels in front of and behind me quite dark.
….
While taking all this in, the English-speaking guide came up from below, tentatively sidled over, handed me a slip of paper, and disappeared without a word. On the paper, “The train leaves Yubari station at 16:22.” I looked at my watch. It was just after 15:00. I had stayed nearly two hours, which was apparently enough to make them nervous.’
I took my time walking the quiet streets back to the station, taking photos along the way, especially after the sun came out. I arrived just in time to catch the 16:22 train, but instead of getting on, I watched it pull out of the station, and then setoff down the valley on foot to find dinner. The entire narrow valley was quite developed, as I had seen from my ride into town on the train, and I expected to have my choice of several eateries. It took me over a kilometer to find one, and it was closed.
I passed the next station on the railway and still found nothing to eat, not even a red banner with the vertical katakana spelling of “ramen” that seems to show up on about every other corner.
After three and a half kilometers down the main road, I came to my first opened restaurant. The staff didn’t speak much English and didn’t have an English menu, but after a few minutes I managed to order their chicken dinner set, which included tea, soup, rice, and a plate of sliced, raw chicken that I cooked myself at the gas grill in the center of my table. They also served ice cream, which was incredibly tempting, but I decided to pass and try to make the 18:17 train, which I barely caught after a brisk, uphill walk to the nearest station.
….
The thing is, Japan still wants coal.
Of course, like other developed countries, if Japan still had a coal industry, it wouldn’t be labor-intensive. But the mining jobs that remained would require skilled labor and thus carry wages. And the wages would certainly be higher than those paid to the Chinese miners who now meet some part of Japan’s demand for coal.
(För en kinesisk kolarbetare ligger lönen på 70 till 100 yuan per dag, vilket motsvarar 60 till 85 svenska kronor)
Under 90-talet levde staden upp till sina forna glansdagar en gång om året, under den årliga filmfestivalen. Men sedan staden förklarade sig bankrutt för ett par år sedan så upphörde även filmfestvalen.
Festivalens mest prominenta gäst bör ha varit Quentin Tarantino.
Tarantino trivdes enligt egen utsago väldigt bra i Yubari och skrev delar av manuset till Pulp Fiction på sitt hotellrum under film-festivalen.
Han trivdes så bra att han 2003 hedrade filmfestivalen, och den döende staden, genom att döpa en av karaktärerna i Kill Bill till just Yubari.
Gogo Yuburi
