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Tourists visit the Iwami Ginzan Silver Mine Ruins. The mine and its surroundings were registered onto the list of World Heritage Sites in 2007.
Ko Sasaki for The New York Times
International Herald Tribune
ASIA - PACIFIC
By Norimitsu Onishi
Published: September 5, 2008
OMORI, Japan: Home to a silver mine whose production peaked nearly four centuries ago and finally closed in 1923, this tiny rural town in western Japan once seemed doomed to suffer the fate of so many former boomtowns. Perhaps one day, after the last of the die-hards had moved away and the town's abandoned wooden houses had been ground to dust, the surrounding thick forests would have simply swallowed up Omori.
But after intense lobbying by Japan, the Iwami Silver Mine here, which many Japanese had never heard of, was improbably named a Unesco World Heritage site last year. Having joined the ranks of the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, Angkor Wat, not to mention Japan's own Kyoto and Nara, Omori — population 413 — has been flooded with hundreds of thousands of tourists.
On some days, the mostly elderly residents, used to leaving their doors unlocked and stepping outside in their pajamas, have been unable to cross the town's one long, narrow street, so dense are the crowds of tourists. One 90-year-old man even woke up one day and found three tourists relaxing on a sofa inside his house.
The World Heritage designation has been a godsend for Omori's home prefecture of Shimane, which, like most other economically depressed areas in rural Japan, has been trying to raise revenues through tourism. Not surprisingly, some regional governments are now pushing 40 of their own World Heritage contenders, ranging from Mount Fuji to sites of varying degrees of obscurity.
Still, the designation of this relatively unknown site has raised eyebrows, not least among locals and visitors. It is also likely to deepen the larger debate over whether the World Heritage label is being diluted through an ever-growing list of locations — now standing at 878 worldwide — and whether inclusion can do more harm than good in preserving a place unprepared for the inevitable influx of tourism.
On a recent sweltering day, Junichi Shiba, a 62-year-old salaryman from Tokyo, and his wife were among the hundreds of tourists who walked up the lone street lined with old houses and hiked to the site's main attraction: a 518-foot-long mine shaft. Shiba said they came here even though they had never heard of the Iwami Silver Mine until its World Heritage designation and even though a friend, who had visited, told them not to bother. But a World Heritage site was a World Heritage site, after all.
"So we decided to come," Shiba said shortly after coming out of the shaft, complaining there was little to see here compared with other World Heritage sites he had visited in Japan and Thailand. "Our friend was right."
Like other tourists, Shiba did not see the extensive network of mine shafts and pits, smelting and refining facilities, and the remains of settlements and fortresses, since most of the area has been blanketed by forests. In its heyday, the mine is said to have employed thousands of workers, produced up to two tons of silver a year and accounted for nearly 7 percent of the world's production of silver. Though Japan was closed to the world back then, much of the silver is said to have been smuggled out to Asia from three nearby ports.
But by the early 1970s, decades after the last ore of silver was extracted, Omori had emptied out so rapidly that it was featured as a quintessential ghost town in Japanese magazines. In 1971, the silver mine drew 15,000 tourists, mostly curious locals. (By comparison, in the 12 months following its World Heritage designation in July 2007, 925,800 tourists came here.)
Some locals began thinking of ways to rescue Omori, especially Toshiro Nakamura, who founded a prostheses company called Nakamura Brace here in 1974 and eventually built it into a multimillion dollar business.
"My father used to say that though this was a world-famous silver mine, there was barely anybody left, and that it would keep declining and become a ghost town," said Nakamura, 60, whose family went back generations here. "But then my father would wonder, even though everyone was leaving, whether one person would rise up and cherish and take care of his hometown."
Nakamura made that his life's mission, establishing his business here and continuing to live to this day in his family's modest house. Over the years, Nakamura personally spent more than $9 million to refurbish some 30 old houses and establish a small museum filled with maps, ingots and other artifacts from the mine's glory days.
If Nakamura became the biggest champion of the Iwami Silver Mine as a World Heritage site, his goals dovetailed with those of the prefecture, which had close ties to Japanese diplomats entrusted with making the case for Iwami at Unesco's World Heritage Committee.
Not everyone here, though, was in favor. Some harbored misgivings about mass tourism's effects on Omori's quiet lifestyle and on its surviving mining heritage. Omori, after all, had almost no tourism infrastructure — just one family-run inn with only eight rooms. Places like Lijiang, China, and even the historic villages of Shirakawa, in Japan, had suffered from the rapid development and other effects resulting from World Heritage status. Also, others were not sure that the Iwami Silver Mine was, well, of World Heritage caliber.
"Other sites like the Pyramids or China's Terracota Warriors are old and impressive, and take away your breath at first sight," said Daikichi Matsuba, 55, owner of a company making handmade clothes and crafts. "The Iwami Silver Mine is a little hard to understand."
Matsuba, who was in favor of turning Omori into a small, quaint town that would attract repeat tourists, worried that the World Heritage designation would simply draw one-time visitors or tour groups. Matsuba, who had led the opposition, was now focusing on limiting the damage from mass tourism by lobbying to restrict the number of fume-spewing large tourist buses and making sure that new businesses' storefront signs adhered to local regulations.
Early last year, it appeared as if the opponents would win. A World Heritage site candidate in the cultural category has to meet at least one out of six criteria to be listed, and Japan argued that the Iwami Silver Mine fulfilled three of them.
But after conducting research here, the International Council on Monuments and Sites, which issues recommendations to the World Heritage Committee, judged that Iwami met none of the criteria. In a lengthy report, the council said that Japan had not offered evidence that Iwami was an "exceptional case" that had influenced the development of mining outside Japan; it concluded that Iwami was not of "outstanding universal value."
The council recommended that the World Heritage Committee "defer" Iwami's application — a decision after which a country typically withdraws the application before gathering more evidence and resubmitting it a few years later. But Japan pressed ahead with the application, which, after strong backing from allies, particularly from Africa, was approved by the World Heritage Committee in June of last year.
If tourism has benefited the prefecture, the benefits have yet to trickle down to Omori, according to small business owners here. Most tourists came aboard buses and left after visiting the mine shaft, locals said.
"They go quickly up to the mine shaft, take a look, then get back on their buses," said Minoru Umehara, 71, in front of whose house hordes of tourists pass by on their way to the mine shaft.
"When I ask them what they saw, they say, 'We just saw a hole,' " Umehara said, laughing.
Then there was Suetaro Ishiga, the 90-year-old Omori native who woke up one day and found that three tourists had mistakenly wandered into his home and were sitting on his sofa.
"To tell you the truth, this used to be a good, quiet town," Ishiga said, answering a knock on his door and stepping outside in the pajama-like long underpants that most locals wore only indoors since the World Heritage designation.
"I can't say I'm happy," he said. "But for the sake of my ancestors, I have to believe it was a good thing."
Copyright © 2008 the International Herald Tribune
