Utashinai, Hokkaido

The population here has thinned to almost nothing — fewer residents than some Tokyo apartment blocks — yet Utashinai still holds the designation of a city, a bureaucratic fact that sits quietly alongside the emptied streets. ペンケウタシュナイ川 runs through the center of town, and the mountains of the 夕張山地 press in close, including 神威岳, whose name the ski area borrows. Before any of this, the land was Ainu territory, then briefly a garrison posting for the 庄内藩, and then, for the better part of a century, a coal town whose output once filled entire freight trains heading south.

The mines closed, and the population fell away in waves. What remains is a town relearning how to exist. かもい岳国際スキー場 anchors the winter economy, and the 市営かもい岳温泉 offers a bath beside it — the kind of facility that serves skiers in the day and locals in the evening, without much distinction between the two. More quietly, grapes are being grown on slopes where the soil has rested since the industry left, and a winery is taking shape on former mining land, scheduled to open in 2025. The act of fermenting something from this particular ground — post-industrial, cold, forested — carries its own kind of statement, though the town makes it without fanfare.

Walking through Utashinai, the scale of what was once here is legible in the infrastructure that remains: roads built for a larger population, civic buildings with more ambition than current use demands. The place doesn't conceal its history. It simply continues alongside it.