Girls Yokosou

The classroom in this photograph still holds its artwork. Colours faded, paper curled at the edges, the work of students who passed through Yubari Municipal Asahi Elementary School between 1975 and 1983 remains fixed to the walls as though the room is waiting for someone to come back and take it down. Asahi Elementary opened on 1 April 1975, built as a new reinforced-concrete three-storey structure on the site of the demolished Yubari Daini (Second) Elementary School in the Fukuzumi district. Three schools had been consolidated to make it: Yubari Daini, Teibi, and Fukuzumi Elementary. The predecessor schools had educated thousands of children during Yubari's coal boom years; Yubari Daini alone enrolled 2,827 students across 52 classes at its 1952 peak. By the time those three schools merged into Asahi, only 351 students remained across 13 classes. The coal industry that had sustained 107,972 people at the 1960 census was already in its final contraction. The school operated for eight years. On 31 March 1983, Asahi Elementary closed and merged with Yubari First Elementary to form Yubari Elementary School. The building was built for a city that had already begun to disappear. In October 1994, Yubari Kanko Kaihatsu Co., Ltd. was established as a city-backed third-sector tourism entity, with Yubari's mayor serving as its representative director. The company converted the former school into Family School Fureai, a public lodging and group training facility, classrooms repurposed with tatami mat flooring. It was the company's first facility. By 2006, as Yubari's fiscal crisis became public and the city moved toward declaring insolvency, Family School Fureai ceased accepting guests. Yubari Kanko Kaihatsu filed for bankruptcy on 2 April 2007, carrying ¥5.46 billion in total debt. The building was not among the facilities transferred to the successor operator. It has had no custodian since. The tourism business that included this building contributed ¥18.6 billion, 53% of the total deficit, to Yubari's fiscal collapse. The city has been repaying that debt ever since. This photograph was made in 2016, nine years after the bankruptcy, with the artwork still on the walls and the classroom otherwise intact.