This artwork was showcased in an old Japanese-style house that’s over a hundred years old. Located along the road connecting The Sado Gold Mine and the Sado Magistrate’s Office, it used to be the living quarters for the miners in the past.

Here, we’ll introduce a group of pictures of the Hosokura Mine in Miyagi Prefecture. As a world heritage site, The Sado Gold Mine is a very big tourist attraction, but the topic of the lives of the people here isn’t discussed much. The Sado mines were active, not until the end of the Edo Period, but until 1989. It was active during the same period of time as the Hosokura Mine. As such, this display helps to paint a picture of what it was like to work at the mines during those times.

The Hosokura Mines are at the foot of the Ou Mountains and they primarily mined lead and zinc. Born in 1941 in former Manchuria, Eiko Terasaki moved to Hosokura with her family and made a living running the family shop. When the mine’s closing was announced in 1986, she took her camera and began taking pictures of the town to document it. She took pictures of the children animals, workers, and all kinds of snippets of life there. She also painstakingly documented how the town changed and began to be overgrown with weeds after the mine shut down and people began to leave. She left behind a total of approximately 11,000 negatives.

She passed away at the age of 75 in 2016, but this exhibition showcases a glimpse of her work, selected from her negatives which she’d never printed. Through her lens, we can see the slowly fading town, the history of Sado’s mine, and their lives there.