Ube (Chemical Industry Town) about 60 years ago and today

History of Ube (Chemical Industry Town)

The area in front of Ube-Shinkawa Station is the center of a town that rose on coal. However, because the coal of Ube was dug from under the sea, whichever era of the aerial photographs you open, nothing like the pit mouths or spoil heaps that come to mind when you hear "coal mining town" can be made out in the frame. Instead, the roofs of factories spreading around the port appear, along with round storage tanks lined up on a long, narrow strip of land jutting into the bay. The port from around the time coal stopped being mined appears with that layout as it was.

The coalfield under the sea and the factories

According to materials of the Coal Memorial Museum compiled by the City of Ube, the area of Ube and Sanyo-Onoda was called the "Ube Coalfield", and coal is thought to have been mined at least by the early part of the Edo period. From the middle of the Edo period salt making flourished along the coast of the Seto Inland Sea, and coal was used as fuel for boiling down the salt. From around the middle of the Meiji era, mining came to advance under the sea in search of more coal, and Ube became known as a town of undersea coal mines.

In 1897 local people put up the funds to form a cooperative for the Okinoyama Coal Mine. UBE's corporate history places this at the beginning of the company. Watanabe Yusaku, who was at its center, set out the aim of replacing coal, a finite resource that would one day be exhausted, with the value of industry, and of leaving lasting prosperity to the region. In line with that idea, an iron works that made and maintained coal-mining machinery was born in 1914, a cement company using limestone and waste soil from the mines in 1923, and a nitrogen industry company making the fertilizer ammonium sulfate from coal in 1933. In 1942 these four companies combined to become Ube Industries. Raising factories that used coal beside the coal mines came to decide the course of the town after the mines closed.

The framework of the town was also put in place in this period. Ube Village became a city in 1921 without passing through the stage of a town, and in 1925 the Ube Railway between Ube and Ogori was opened along its whole length. This is today's JR Ube Line. In 1933 Ube Port was completed.

Even before mining ended, chemical work had spread beyond coal. In UBE's corporate history, the Ube Caprolactam Plant was newly built in 1955 and the manufacture of caprolactam began, and in 1959 the company moved on to manufacturing nylon 6 resin using it as raw material. In 1969, two years after the mine closure, the Coal Memorial Museum, which passes on the history of the coalfield, opened on the shore of Lake Tokiwa. The memory of the work of digging moved to an exhibition by the lake, while chemical work remained in the factories at the port.

A photograph that straddles the mine closure

The 1961-69 photograph falls exactly in the period straddling the end of mining. In the chronology of the City of Ube, Ube Industries' Ube Mining Works closed in 1967, and with this as the last, all the coal mines of the Ube Coalfield were closed. Even so, no emptiness suggesting an end appears in the frame. A mass of factories packed with roofs spreads from the middle of the frame toward the southwest, and its position corresponds to the place UBE shows on its maps as the Ube Chemical Factory. West of the factories a faintly shining inlet cuts in, to the south the dark water surface of the port spreads, and ships crowd at the edge of the quays. Tracks coming down diagonally from the upper left split into many lines just before the port.

At the left edge of the frame, a long, narrow strip of land juts south across a thin waterway, and partway along it white round storage tanks line up. At its northern end too, factory buildings and storage tanks are grouped together. A wide water surface under the shadow of clouds lies further left, and a flat surface with a faint outline floats on it. The right half looks different: a river straightened into a line flows from the upper right downward, and a fine grid of rows of houses fills both its banks. The top third of the frame is hills covered with fields and woods, and there is a pond in the upper right corner. The factories, the port and the town are concentrated in the south, while in the north the color of fields still prevails; this north-south difference is the composition of this era.

Reading the port and the storage tanks by color

In 1974-78, many tracks are bundled beside the factories in the center, and a yard extends diagonally. Reddish-brown roofs are mixed in among the factory roofs. In the eastern part of the port, a long, narrow landing pier carrying tracks juts into the water, and a structure that connects ships and freight cars directly can be seen. On the long, narrow strip of land on the left, several greenish round storage tanks line up, and on the flat land west of it white rectangular lots line up neatly. In the upper left corner, factory buildings and round storage tanks are also grouped on the far bank of the waterway, and beside them two dark green water surfaces like ponds lie side by side. On the hills at the top, bare ground is carved between the woods, and much of the fields on the north side has been replaced by rows of houses and school grounds. This photograph is from about ten years after the mine closure, yet the area of the factories around the port does not look smaller than in 1961-69.

The flat land jutting into the sea and the surroundings of the inlet have many places of low elevation. The City of Ube has compiled on its hazard map the assumptions of how far storm surges and flooding would reach.

Overlaying three points in time

The outlines of the inlet and the port, and the shape of the long, narrow strip of land on the left, have hardly changed in the photograph as of 2026 from the two older eras. The change is in the contents. The bundle of tracks has fewer lines, and the tracks have disappeared from the landing pier in the eastern part of the port, which has become a flatly paved quay. The round storage tanks on the land on the left have changed to light blue roofs while keeping their arrangement, and the white rectangular lots west of them are covered by a dark surface of fine grid. In the upper left of the frame, an elevated road crosses the waterway in a large arc. The bare ground on the hills at the top has returned to woods and remains as a mass of green.

UBE changed its company name from Ube Industries in 2022. As of 2026 the addresses of the Ube Works and the Ube Chemical Factory are both in Oaza Kogushi, which on the map corresponds to the corner of the factories that appears in the center of the photograph. The coal dug under the sea left almost no trace above ground, but the factories placed for the sake of coal stayed in the same place after the mines closed. If you line up the three points in time, the transition from a coal mining town to a chemical industry town appears not as a replacement of the land but as a replacement of the contents of the factories surrounding the port.