When we visited Yubari in Hokkaido, Family School Fureai was the first abandoned building we photographed there. It was also Sal's first time inside an abandoned building of any kind.
Two things become obvious quickly when you photograph abandoned buildings in Japan: the buildings are not stripped of furniture, fittings, and personal items the way they are in Australia; and there is an almost total absence of graffiti. The only writing we found was some kanji on a chalkboard.
Family School Fureai started life as Yubari City Asahi Elementary School. It was built in 1956 to serve the children of the booming Shimizusawa mining community, and closed in 1991 when the mines closed and the families left. In the mid-1990s the city repurposed it as a tourism attraction, the "Family School Fureai" of the current name, where visitors could experience a day in a Japanese rural school. After Yubari's 2007 bankruptcy the attraction was shut down. The building has been off-limits since.
Then there was the seal.
Down one of the corridors, there is a taxidermied seal. A very large taxidermied seal. The first thing my brain offered when I rounded the corner was "bear." Sal had not yet seen it. I went back and said something along the lines of: "Sal, there's something in the next corridor you should know is not real, but you still have to see it." Technically it is real. Specifically, a real taxidermy.
I had no idea seals get that big.
The Daily Mail picked up the photographs for a feature on Yubari and the school.
"These haunting photographs offer a glimpse into a once-bustling Japanese school building, left to crumble into ruin after being abandoned. The derelict classrooms and corridors of Yubari's Asahi Elementary School were once filled with children of all ages, but now they are left waterlogged, vandalised and riddled with decay."
Read the full feature at Daily Mail.
