Cafeteria

The Family School Fureai cafeteria sits on the lower level of the building, its floor reading green from algae that has come up through standing water. Puddles fill the slight dips in the concrete; the green tinge spreads from the puddles outward across the wider floor. The dining tables and benches were removed at some point, leaving the room as a single open hall. Light comes in from windows on the long side wall. The walls themselves are pale, mottled with damp, the lower courses spotted with mould. The whole room reads as a slowly returning wetland with walls.

This was where children ate during both phases of the building's life: as elementary-school students from 1975 to 1983, then as residents during the Family School Fureai dormitory years from 1994 to 2007. The kitchen is at one end of the room. Most of its fittings were stripped when the dormitory closed. The floor, however, was left in place. Hokkaido winters dropped enough cold into the building each year that the floor went through repeated freeze-thaw cycles, opening up cracks that water continued to exploit. By 2016, when this photograph was made, the floor had become a kind of seasonal pond.