An old copper town perched in the mountains, rust-coloured facades and roof tiles that seem to have soaked up the sun… In Fukiya, the mine has fallen silent, but its red stayed everywhere.
Red at the end of the road
Fukiya appears after a long climb into the mountains of Okayama, at around 550 metres. The road narrows, the forest opens, and a whole street rises in red under a blue sky.
On this trip with my parents, the plan fit in a few words: walk slowly, sit on a bench for a few minutes, then wander off again down the lanes. The village is compact, almost silent. The houses follow one another with their dark latticework, ochre walls and heavy red-brown tiles. Nobody has mentioned the mine yet, and its colour has already told the whole story.
The mine that painted Japan
From the middle of the Edo period to the Meiji era, Fukiya prospered thanks to the Yoshioka copper mine and the making of bengara. This red iron-oxide pigment came from an ore dug out together with the copper, and at first it was seen as plain waste.
Heated, washed and ground to powder, it coloured Kutani and Imari porcelain and Wajima lacquer, and it also protected the timber of houses and the hulls of ships. The word bengara is said to come from Bengal, but Fukiya turned this travelling pigment into a deeply Japanese colour. The mine sold copper; its waste ended up repainting Japan.
A colour chart agreed between neighbours
The harmony of the streets is no accident. At the end of the Edo period and through the Meiji era, the village’s rich merchants agreed to build a coherent whole. They brought in master carpenters from Iwami, in today’s Shimane Prefecture, men used to building shrines and grand residences.
The facades were dressed in bengara latticework, red earthen walls and white namako-kabe patterns. On the roofs, Sekishū tiles carried the same copper tones. Each house keeps its quirks, but they all seem to have dipped into the same pot of paint. Such unity was exceptional for the time. Fukiya was listed as a preservation district for traditional buildings as early as 1977, then joined the “Japan Red” heritage story in 2020. Long before town colour charts existed, the village notables had already chosen their art direction.
The mine’s god, without miners
Leaving the main street, a lane climbs between the houses. At the end waits a wooden torii, flanked by two komainu and followed by a steep staircase. This is the old Yama-jinja, the shrine that once watched over the copper mine.
Its main hall, finely carved, is said to date from 1801. When Mitsubishi took over the Yoshioka mine in 1873, the company helped maintain the shrine, and its three diamonds still appear on the torii and the stone railings. After the mine closed in 1972, Yama-jinja slowly lost its purpose. Its deity was moved in 1999 to Takakusa Hachiman shrine. The old hall stayed alone among the trees, above the red roofs.
Red after the mine
From the heights of the shrine, Fukiya finally shows itself whole. The roofs pile up between the trees, stained with moss, brown and red. Walking back down, you find the narrow passages again, the worn walls and the latticework catching the light.
Local bengara production stopped in 1974. The colour, though, left the workshops and became the landscape. A red less bright than a torii, earthier, almost mineral: the red of a village that kept the dust of its history on its walls. Beneath the houses, the galleries have gone quiet. Above them, Fukiya still wears the colour of what was torn from the ground.
For another mine that stayed in the landscape, the white Shiraishi mine. The village on the Takahashi city website ↗.
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