Corridor

A dark upholstered armchair sits against the corridor wall at Family School Fureai in Yubari, Hokkaido, Japan. Ceiling tiles have collapsed onto the debris-covered floor around it. Strip lighting hangs loose from the overhead frame. High windows let in flat, grey light. The corridor stretches through a reinforced-concrete three-storey building that has had no operator since 2007 and no maintenance for longer than that. The building was constructed in 1975 on the demolished site of Yubari Daini (Second) Elementary School, which at its peak in 1952 had enrolled 2,827 students across 52 classes. By the time Asahi Elementary School opened on 1 April 1975, consolidating three predecessor schools, Yubari Daini, Teibi, and Fukuzumi, only 351 students remained across 13 classes. The coal industry that had built the city to a population of 107,972 at the 1960 census was already in its final contraction. Asahi Elementary closed on 31 March 1983, just eight years after it opened, merging into Yubari Elementary School as the city's declining population made even the consolidated school unsustainable. The building sat unused until the mid-1990s, when Yubari Kanko Kaihatsu Co., Ltd., a third-sector tourism entity with capital of ¥30 million, whose representative director was simultaneously the Yubari City Mayor, converted the classrooms to tatami-floored guest rooms and opened Family School Fureai as a public lodging and group training facility. It was the company's first facility. The conversion was part of Yubari's broader attempt to reinvent itself as a tourism destination after the last coal mine closed in March 1990. The strategy failed at a scale that made Yubari the only municipality in Japan to be designated a fiscal rehabilitation entity. Of the ¥35.3 billion deficit Yubari City declared in June 2006, the tourism business account, the category that included Family School Fureai, contributed ¥18.6 billion, the single largest component at 53% of the total. Yubari Kanko Kaihatsu ceased all operations on 31 March 2007 and filed for bankruptcy on 2 April 2007 with total debts of ¥5.46 billion. Family School Fureai was not among the facilities transferred to the successor operator. It was left unmanaged. Photographed in 2016, the corridor records what remained: a chair against the wall, a ceiling giving way, and grey light from windows that once looked out over a mining city of 100,000 people.