The historian bug bites me again...

So, this coming weekend, I have an ultimate tournament in Yubari. Never heard of it? Not surprising. But in Japan, it's well known for a couple of reasons. One is the melons. Canteloupes, or rockmelons if you like. It's also known for being the city that is bankrupt. This is a "city" - town really, at this point - of 10,000 people that has millions of dollars of debt. Why? The reasons are obviously many, but suffice to say, it was a coal boom town, and for the last twenty years, there have been ZERO coal mines operating. The last one closed up shop in 1990, though the first closure dates back to the 1960s. So there is quite a bit of writing to be found about Yubari around the interwebs, as well as non-electronic mediums. Of course, it helps if you can read Japanese, though there is a fair amount of English language writing out there as well.

After riding my bike there last weekend, my interest has been piqued by finding out that at it's peak, Yubari had something like 116,000 residents. It was, at the time, about the 4th largest city in Hokkaido, no small feat when you consider the location.

And all of this internet research has been leading me towards a possible paper, and here's the first few lines that I thought of.

"What is Yubari? Sure, there are the simple answers. It's a cautionary tale, warning municipal leaders against putting all their eggs in one proverbial basket. It's the tale of one boondoggle after another at the tail end of the bubble economy. It's the namesake of a secondary character in Quentin Tarintino's Kill Bill. It's the home of a once major international film festival that saw the director of Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs appear as a guest more than once. But all those answers are too easy."

If this is really going to happen, it's going to need some serious time and leg work. But I'm really hooked on the story of this town. We'll just have to wait and see.