Naie, Hokkaido

Along the left bank of the Ishikari River, the land flattens into a wide agricultural plain where melon fields and rice paddies stretch toward the horizon. Further east, the ground rises into the Yūbari Mountains, forested and quiet. Between these two zones sits Naie, a town in Hokkaido's Sorachi region whose proportions feel slightly too large for its current population — wide roads, a modest station on the Hakodate Main Line, gaps in the streetscape where buildings once stood.

The reason for those gaps is written into the town's chronology. Coal was discovered in the Naie coalfield in the late nineteenth century, and the Sumitomo Mining operation that opened in the late 1930s drew workers in numbers that the town's infrastructure was built to accommodate. When the mine closed in the early 1970s, that population drained away, leaving the physical frame of a busier era. The Naie Power Station, a Hokkaido Electric thermal plant that began operating in the late 1960s, marked the town's attempt to find a new industrial footing — though the plant itself has since gone into suspension, with full decommissioning ahead.

What remains is agricultural. Lily bulbs are grown here alongside tomatoes and rice, and the melon fields carry the particular weight of Hokkaido's short, productive summers. The town continues to tend its land and manage its decline with what appears to be practical resolve — welfare policy, agricultural promotion, the ordinary work of a community that has outlasted its founding industry.