Dining Storage

The service room at Family School Fureai sits at the back of a reinforced-concrete three-storey building in Fukuzumi, Yubari, Hokkaido. Broken ceramic bowls and a red plastic laundry basket cover the floor near the rear exit. A ceiling panel hangs loose above the doorway, and paint has peeled back from the right wall to reveal a darker layer beneath. A television set sits in a plastic crate close to the threshold. The rear doors stand open onto bare winter trees. This is what the room looked like in 2016, a decade after the last guests departed. The building started as Yubari Municipal Asahi Elementary School, opened 1 April 1975 on the demolished site of Yubari Daini (Second) Elementary School. It was purpose-built in reinforced concrete, three storeys, consolidating three predecessor schools: Yubari Daini, Teibi, and Fukuzumi. Opening enrolment was 351 students across 13 classes. The coal industry that had sustained all three predecessor schools was already in steep decline when the building went up. Asahi Elementary closed on 31 March 1983, eight years after opening, merged into Yubari Elementary School as the city's child population continued to fall. The building stood vacant for roughly a decade. In October 1994, Yubari Kanko Kaihatsu Co., Ltd. was established as a Yubari City third-sector tourism entity, with capital of ¥30 million and the city's mayor, Kenji Goto, as representative director. The former school building was converted into Family School Fureai, a public lodging and group training facility. Classrooms were repurposed as guest rooms, and communal bathing facilities, a dining hall, and training rooms were added. It was the company's first facility. The tourism reinvention that Family School Fureai was part of accumulated debts that Yubari could not repay. The city declared its intention to seek fiscal rehabilitation status in June 2006, having accumulated deficits of approximately ¥35.3 billion. The tourism business account was the single largest contributor, at ¥18.6 billion, or 53 percent of the total deficit. Family School Fureai stopped accepting guests in 2006. Yubari Kanko Kaihatsu filed for bankruptcy on 2 April 2007, with total debts of ¥5.46 billion. The facility was not among those transferred to a successor operator. It was left unmanaged. The bowls, the laundry basket, the television in its crate: none of it was cleared. The photograph made in 2016 records the room as the operator left it.