6.2 KiB
title, album, wiki, release_date, lrc
| title | album | wiki | release_date | lrc | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Yuubari | Shirakaba Express Service |
|
2026-11-23 | yuubari.lrc |
Yuubari
The previous one is technically 'Yuuparo' but close enough for me to tag this one 2.
A song about how life goes on under perceived turmoil thousands of metres away.
Lyrics (working)
// Mostly, just list objects. But objects with an observer and that is how I get in.
Things I have heard; things I have read; things I have seen; things I have been.
// Coal
Coal in the mountain. Mine entrance, burnt down once and twice. Names of good hope and names of misfortune.
Drum cutters, oxygen packs, boring pits turned water closets. Air compression, oil lubrication, self-propelled pillar shields.
// The power plant
// Roads
Road extending eastwards through the mountains. Road redirected above the submerged communities. Road tunnelling west in place of the zigzag railway and the legendary amusement park. Road up north with a million hairpins and deer unseen now closed for prolonged repairs. Road passing by along the active
// Houses (residential)
// Melons and (long) yams or in a sense agriculture
// The shrine
// Public service buildings, disused or new
// ...
Scratch: materials
Facts, verified, for the 'precisely delivering' half. Nothing here is drafted text.
Depth axis — the part that can't be visited
- 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.
- 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.
- Last body recovered 1982-03-28, 163 days after. Mine closed October 1982.
- 1985: gas explosion at 三菱南大夕張炭鉱, 62 dead. That mine closed March 1990 — the last one.
- So the 'thousands of metres away' is vertical, sealed, and was deliberately drowned by the same people who worked it.
Distance axis — how the town is consumed from outside
- 2006 declaration, 2007-03 entry into 財政再生 with ¥35.3 bn accumulated deficit. First and only Japanese municipality to do it.
- 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.
- 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.
- Population: 107,972 (1960), peak ~120,000, 6,374 (2024-01-31), projected 5,618 by 2025.
- 2019-03-31: JR 夕張支線 closed after 127 years. Replaced by bus.
- 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.
- The official city website styles itself メロンのまち.
- Compact-city policy: population deliberately consolidated toward 清水沢.
Structural note
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.
The thing to deliver (author, 2026-08-27)
The people actually living there are occupied with making life better, not with answering the voices thousands of miles away. Not defiance — defiance would still be a reply. They simply have their own problems and they deal with them.
Craft consequence: the text must not rebut the tragedy narrative either. A counter-catalogue that answers the outside framing is still organised by it.
Relation to the town: not hometown, not exile. 'Hometown' is only the nearest available word and it is the wrong size. The absence of a right-sized word is usable material, cf. Paranoma's 呼び方も知らない、意味も分からない全て.
Definition (author, 2026-08-28)
Phase-agnostic. Not about expansion or contraction. It is about having too much business to mind for any time to be spared on inter-human fights, conspiracies, clashes of ideologies — and collectively higher QoL falling out of that as a by-product, not a goal.
Indifference is downstream of it. Hardship makes people indifferent but not numb. Neutral is the word, not numb.
Politics: the left/union alignment is real but zeit-dependent and attached to the mine. Fact, not subject. Do not dwell.
Melon — verified, and it is not the after-picture
- 1960 (S35): 17 farmers form the melon co-op. Ten melons fruit that year. 1960 is also the year the population peaked at 107,972.
- 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.
- Stated motive at the time was 産業転換 — diversifying off coal. In 1960. At maximum.
- The land was bad for it: volcanic ash soil, mountainous. They did it anyway.
- 1973-10-05 first trademark application. 1979-05-31 trademark registered (the sticker), i.e. before the 1981 outburst and eleven years before the last mine closed.
- 1993-10-29 「夕張メロン」 registered.
So the melon is not the replacement industry. It is the continuo: one line running under the peak, the outburst, the closures, the bankruptcy and the repayment, uninterrupted since the year the town was at its largest.
Register key: 不卑不亢
Supersedes 'neutral'. It is relational, not oblivious: the town knows exactly what is said about it and declines both available postures.
Two failure modes, both idiomatic in English, neither available in 不卑不亢:
- 卑 — the elegiac hush. once, no longer, what remains, passive voice, wistfulness.
- 亢 — the resilience register. still, despite, nevertheless, even now, carry on, refuse to die. 'Quietly' is 亢 wearing 卑's coat.
Working rule: no comparatives, no concessives. Comparatives invite pity, concessives invite admiration. State the quantity with its date and stop. 'Population 6,374, as of 31 January 2024.' No adjective.
Note: the discarded people-line escalates working → fighting → dying. The cadence itself pleads. That is why it read as artificial — it is 卑 by structure.