Hallway

The hallway runs through what was once Yubari Municipal Asahi Elementary School, a reinforced-concrete three-storey building constructed in 1975 on the demolished site of the earlier Yubari Daini (Second) Elementary School. Sunlight falls through windows fogged with grime onto walls stripped bare by decades of moisture, paint curling away in long sections, the floor beneath it layered with dust and fallen debris. Asahi Elementary opened on 1 April 1975, consolidating three predecessor schools: Yubari Daini, Teibi, and Fukuzumi. The consolidation was itself a measure of how far Yubari had already declined. In 1952, Yubari Daini alone had enrolled 2,827 students across 52 classes. By the time the three schools were folded into Asahi in 1975, the combined opening roll was 351 students across 13 classes. The coal mines that had built the city were closing. The building was purpose-built and already facing obsolescence. The school operated for eight years. On 31 March 1983, Asahi Elementary closed, its remaining students merged into Yubari Elementary School. The building sat adjacent to the Coal History Village, a tourism complex the city opened that same year as part of a broader effort to reinvent itself after the mines. In approximately late 1994, Yubari Kanko Kaihatsu Co., Ltd., a city-backed third-sector entity, converted the former school into Family School Fureai, a public lodging and group training facility. Classrooms were repurposed as guest rooms. The building took in visitors for roughly a decade before Yubari City's fiscal collapse became public in June 2006. The facility ceased accepting guests that year. Yubari Kanko Kaihatsu filed for bankruptcy on 2 April 2007, carrying total debts of ¥5.46 billion. Family School Fureai was not among the assets transferred to any successor operator and has remained unmanaged since. The tourism business that included this building was the single largest contributor to Yubari's fiscal deficit, accounting for ¥18.6 billion of the ¥35.3 billion total the city committed to repay. This photograph, made in 2016, records what the corridor looked like a decade into that abandonment.