Cash Register

The cash register is a small object inside a building that carries a large history. It sits on a counter at Family School Fureai in Yubari, Hokkaido, dust coating its buttons and display, the kind of quiet detail that registers how completely a place has been left behind. The building began as Yubari Municipal Asahi Elementary School, opened on 1 April 1975. It was purpose-built in reinforced concrete, three storeys, constructed on the site of the demolished Yubari Daini Elementary School. Three schools consolidated into one at opening: Yubari Daini, Teibi, and Fukuzumi, with 351 students across 13 classes. The coal industry that had built Yubari to a population of 107,972 at the 1960 census was already in accelerating decline. By 1983, eight years after opening, even the consolidated school had too few children to justify remaining open. Asahi Elementary closed on 31 March 1983 and merged with Yubari First Elementary to form Yubari Elementary School. The building sat on the northern fringe of Yubari's urban corridor, along Hokkaido Prefectural Road 38, adjacent to the Coal History Village. In October 1994, Yubari Kanko Kaihatsu Co., Ltd. was established as a city third-sector tourism entity with capital of ¥30 million. The representative director was Yubari City Mayor Kenji Goto. Family School Fureai was the entity's first facility: the former school classrooms repurposed as tatami-floored guest rooms, communal bathing added, training rooms fitted out, a counter installed, a cash register placed on it. The lodging operated at a base rate of ¥5,600 per night. The tourism strategy that gave the building its second life was also the mechanism of Yubari's fiscal collapse. Of the ¥35.3 billion deficit Yubari declared in June 2006, the tourism business account closure contributed ¥18.6 billion, 53% of the total. Yubari Kanko Kaihatsu filed for bankruptcy on 2 April 2007 with total debt of ¥5.46 billion. Family School Fureai had ceased accepting guests the year before, and was not among the facilities transferred to the successor operator. By 2016, when this photograph was made, the cash register had been sitting untouched for roughly a decade. Yubari remains the only municipality in Japan designated as a fiscal rehabilitation entity, repaying approximately ¥32 billion over 20 years while its population fell below 6,000.