114 lines
6.3 KiB
Markdown
114 lines
6.3 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: Yuubari
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album: Shirakaba Express Service
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wiki:
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publish: false
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release_date: 2026-11-23
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lrc: yuubari.lrc
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---
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# Yuubari
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The previous one is technically 'Yuuparo' but close enough for me to tag this one `2`.
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A song about how life goes on under perceived turmoil thousands of metres away.
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## Lyrics
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```
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There were scenes I've come to known but never seen or heard.
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Coal mines roar low day and night. air compressors, motors, conveyor belts, water pumps, self-propelled tunnel shields, drum cutters, lifts; boilers, generators, locomotives, trucks, and people of the mine.
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Snow over the ever so slightly dwarfed mountain slopes, matrices of lights of alternating patterns every fortnight or so reflecting shift changes; mixtures of snow, steam, smoke in the air, smell of much burning.
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People in the mines, people for the mines, people around the mines, people from the mines; people working, people fighting, people dying.
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// Lines that shouldn't make it to the final text but of the right spirit
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History is an easy thing to learn and remember but nigh impossible to live in. At the same time it is a thing imopossible to not live in.
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My town is sentenced death and revived so many times by history and so many contactless observation endpoints from miles and miles away. I am an exile but I live on with the town.
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```
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## Scratch: materials
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Facts, verified, for the 'precisely delivering' half. Nothing here is drafted text.
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### Depth axis — the part that can't be visited
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- 1981-10-16, 12:41. Gas outburst at 北炭夕張新炭鉱, 810 m below sea level, ~3000 m in from the portal. Fire that night. 93 dead in total.
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- 1981-10-21 the decision, 1981-10-23 13:30 the act: water injected into the mine to kill the fire, with 59 still inside.
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- Last body recovered 1982-03-28, 163 days after. Mine closed October 1982.
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- 1985: gas explosion at 三菱南大夕張炭鉱, 62 dead. That mine closed March 1990 — the last one.
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- So the 'thousands of metres away' is vertical, sealed, and was deliberately drowned by the same people who worked it.
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### Distance axis — how the town is consumed from outside
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- 2006 declaration, 2007-03 entry into 財政再生 with ¥35.3 bn accumulated deficit. First and only Japanese municipality to do it.
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- Repayment of ~¥32.2 bn ran from FY2010 and finishes **end of FY2026**. Exit from 財政再生団体 status three years after that.
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- The city publishes a 借金時計 on its own website — a debt clock, counting down at **¥101,025 per hour**. The page states outright that the figure shown is a projection and differs from the real balance.
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- Population: 107,972 (1960), peak ~120,000, 6,374 (2024-01-31), projected 5,618 by 2025.
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- 2019-03-31: JR 夕張支線 closed after 127 years. Replaced by bus.
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- 2019-04-18: the coal museum's 模擬坑道 caught fire during welding repairs, less than a year after its renewal. The coal seam itself burned. Reopened to the public seven years later.
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- The official city website styles itself メロンのまち.
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- Compact-city policy: population deliberately consolidated toward 清水沢.
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### Structural note
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The 1960 inventory and the 2026 inventory should be written in the same grammar. Same enumerative breath, same flatness. The point is not that one replaced the other; it is that maintenance is as dense with nouns as catastrophe is, and only catastrophe reads legibly from far away.
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### The thing to deliver (author, 2026-08-27)
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The people actually living there are occupied with making life better, not with
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answering the voices thousands of miles away. Not defiance — defiance would still
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be a reply. They simply have their own problems and they deal with them.
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Craft consequence: the text must not rebut the tragedy narrative either. A
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counter-catalogue that answers the outside framing is still organised by it.
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Relation to the town: not hometown, not exile. 'Hometown' is only the nearest
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available word and it is the wrong size. The absence of a right-sized word is
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usable material, cf. Paranoma's 呼び方も知らない、意味も分からない全て.
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### Definition (author, 2026-08-28)
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Phase-agnostic. Not about expansion or contraction. It is about having too much
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business to mind for any time to be spared on inter-human fights, conspiracies,
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clashes of ideologies — and collectively higher QoL falling out of that as a
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by-product, not a goal.
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Indifference is downstream of it. Hardship makes people indifferent but not numb.
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**Neutral** is the word, not numb.
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Politics: the left/union alignment is real but zeit-dependent and attached to the
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mine. Fact, not subject. Do not dwell.
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### Melon — verified, and it is not the after-picture
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- 1960 (S35): 17 farmers form the melon co-op. Ten melons fruit that year.
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**1960 is also the year the population peaked at 107,972.**
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- 1961 (S36): 夕張キング named — F1 hybrid, アールス・フェボリット × スパイシー・カンタロープ.
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- Stated motive at the time was 産業転換 — diversifying off coal. In 1960. At maximum.
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- The land was bad for it: volcanic ash soil, mountainous. They did it anyway.
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- 1973-10-05 first trademark application. 1979-05-31 trademark registered (the sticker),
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i.e. before the 1981 outburst and eleven years before the last mine closed.
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- 1993-10-29 「夕張メロン」 registered.
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So the melon is not the replacement industry. It is the continuo: one line running
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under the peak, the outburst, the closures, the bankruptcy and the repayment,
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uninterrupted since the year the town was at its largest.
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### Register key: 不卑不亢
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Supersedes 'neutral'. It is relational, not oblivious: the town knows exactly what
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is said about it and declines both available postures.
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Two failure modes, both idiomatic in English, neither available in 不卑不亢:
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- 卑 — the elegiac hush. once, no longer, what remains, passive voice, wistfulness.
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- 亢 — the resilience register. still, despite, nevertheless, even now, carry on,
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refuse to die. 'Quietly' is 亢 wearing 卑's coat.
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Working rule: **no comparatives, no concessives.** Comparatives invite pity,
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concessives invite admiration. State the quantity with its date and stop.
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'Population 6,374, as of 31 January 2024.' No adjective.
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Note: the discarded people-line escalates working → fighting → dying. The cadence
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itself pleads. That is why it read as artificial — it is 卑 by structure.
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