Boys Classroom

The boys' classroom at Family School Fureai sits largely as it was left. Desks and chairs are scattered across the floor, no longer in rows, coated in the dust of years. Sunlight comes through the windows and reaches surfaces that have not been touched in a long time. The room holds what it always held: the furniture of a working classroom, now without purpose. The building that contains this room is a three-storey reinforced-concrete structure in Fukuzumi, Yubari, Hokkaido, constructed in 1975 on the demolished site of Yubari Daini Elementary School. It opened on 1 April 1975 as Yubari Municipal Asahi Elementary School, consolidating three predecessor institutions: Yubari Daini, Teibi, and Fukuzumi elementary schools. By the time those three schools merged, Yubari's coal economy had already been contracting for over a decade. The consolidated school opened with 351 students across 13 classes. Yubari Daini alone had enrolled 2,827 students in 1952. Asahi Elementary closed on 31 March 1983, eight years after it opened, merging with Yubari First Elementary to form Yubari Elementary School. The building stood vacant for roughly eleven years before Yubari Kanko Kaihatsu Co., Ltd., a third-sector tourism entity established by Yubari City in October 1994, converted it into a public lodging and group training facility called Family School Fureai. Classrooms were repurposed as guest rooms. The facility operated until 2006, when Yubari City declared its intention to seek fiscal rehabilitation status, having accumulated deficits of approximately ¥35.3 billion. The tourism business that included this building was the single largest contributor to that deficit, accounting for ¥18.6 billion, or 53% of the total. Yubari Kanko Kaihatsu filed for bankruptcy on 2 April 2007 with total debts of ¥5.46 billion. Family School Fureai was not among the facilities transferred to a successor operator. It has had no custodian since. The gymnasium behind the main building, which predates the 1975 construction, had its roof collapse under snow accumulation in January or February 2021. The main building continues to deteriorate. This photograph was made in 2016.