Carpeted Room

The room is unremarkable in almost every detail. A patterned carpet, worn down and filmed with dust, covers the floor from wall to wall. Surfaces have gone grey. Whatever the room held during its years of use is gone. What remains is the carpet, the light, and the quiet of a building that has had no purpose for nearly two decades. The building began as Yubari Municipal Asahi Elementary School, opened on 1 April 1975 on the site of the demolished Yubari Daini (Second) Elementary School. It was a new reinforced-concrete three-storey structure, built to consolidate three schools whose combined enrolment during the 1950s had numbered in the thousands. By the time those three schools, Yubari Daini, Teibi, and Fukuzumi, merged into Asahi, only 351 students across 13 classes remained. The coal industry that had built Yubari, and that had filled those schools, was already failing. Asahi Elementary closed on 31 March 1983, eight years after it opened, absorbed into Yubari Elementary School as depopulation continued. The building sat adjacent to the Coal History Village, a tourism complex the city had opened that same year as part of a strategy to reinvent itself after the mines. For approximately eleven years, the building's use during that period has not been confirmed by available sources. In around late 1994, Yubari Kanko Kaihatsu Co., Ltd., a third-sector tourism entity established by the city with capital of 30 million yen, converted the former school into Family School Fureai, a public lodging and group training facility. Classrooms were repurposed as guest rooms. The facility operated as the first in YKK's portfolio, which would eventually include two hotels, a hot spring, and a ski resort. By June 2006, Yubari had declared its intention to seek fiscal rehabilitation status, carrying accumulated deficits of approximately 35.3 billion yen. Family School Fureai ceased accepting guests that year. YKK filed for bankruptcy on 2 April 2007, carrying total debt of 5.46 billion yen. The facility was not among the assets transferred to the successor operator. It has had no custodian since. The carpet in the photograph records 2016. By then, the building had been empty for a decade.