Boys Yokosu

Boys Yokosu is a room inside the three-storey reinforced-concrete building that once served as Yubari Municipal Asahi Elementary School, and later as Family School Fureai, a public lodging and group training facility in Yubari, Hokkaido. In 2016, when this photograph was made, the room held what the lodging years had left behind: a lone desk, scattered textbooks, dust settling in shafts of window light. The quiet was absolute. The building was constructed in 1975 on the cleared site of Yubari Daini (Second) Elementary School, replacing three predecessor schools whose combined enrolment had already fallen sharply as coal mines closed across the city. Yubari Municipal Asahi Elementary School opened that April with 13 classes and 351 students. By 1983 even those numbers were unsustainable, and the school was merged with Yubari First Elementary to form a single consolidated school. The building had been purpose-built and was obsolete within eight years. For roughly eleven years the structure sat unused. Then, in the mid-1990s, Yubari Kanko Kaihatsu Co., Ltd., a third-sector tourism entity established by Yubari City in October 1994 with capital of ¥30 million, converted the former classrooms into guest rooms and training spaces and reopened the building as Family School Fureai. It was the company's first facility, part of a broader attempt to reinvent a mining city as a tourism destination after the last of Yubari's 24 coal mines closed in 1990. The attempt failed. In June 2006, Yubari City declared fiscal rehabilitation, having accumulated deficits of approximately ¥35.3 billion. Family School Fureai ceased accepting guests that same year. On 31 March 2007, Yubari Kanko Kaihatsu ceased all operations. On 2 April 2007, it filed for bankruptcy with total debts of ¥5.46 billion. The tourism business account, which included this facility, was the largest single contributor to the city's fiscal collapse, accounting for ¥18.6 billion, or 53 percent, of the total deficit to be eliminated. When other facilities transferred to a successor operator in April 2007, Family School Fureai was not among them. The building was left without an operator or custodian. By 2016, the gymnasium roof had not yet collapsed under Hokkaido's winter snow loads; that came in January or February 2021. The main building stood as it appears in this photograph: intact enough to enter, quiet enough to hear the dust fall.