Kitchen

The kitchen of Family School Fureai sits on the ground floor of a three-storey reinforced-concrete building in Fukuzumi, Yubari, Hokkaido. In 2016, sunlight reached the peeling walls and rusted surfaces of a room that had fed children and, years later, groups of lodging guests. By then the building had been without an operator for a decade. The structure was built in 1975 as Yubari Municipal Asahi Elementary School, on the demolished site of the earlier Yubari Daini (Second) Elementary School. It opened with 13 classes and 351 students, the result of consolidating three predecessor schools: Yubari Daini, Teibi, and Fukuzumi. It closed eight years later, on 31 March 1983, when its remaining students were merged into Yubari Elementary School. The coal industry that had filled those classrooms was already in accelerating retreat. Yubari's population had peaked at 107,972 at the 1960 census; by the time Asahi Elementary closed it had fallen to a fraction of that figure. The building stood vacant until around late 1994, when Yubari Kanko Kaihatsu Co., Ltd., a Yubari City third-sector tourism entity with capital of ¥30 million, converted it into a public lodging and group training facility. Classrooms became guest rooms. The facility operated as Family School Fureai, the first in the company's portfolio, which would grow to include two hotels, a hot spring, and a ski resort. The entire enterprise ended when Yubari City declared fiscal rehabilitation in June 2006. Family School Fureai ceased accepting guests that year. Yubari Kanko Kaihatsu filed for bankruptcy on 2 April 2007, carrying total debts of ¥5.46 billion. The tourism business account, of which this facility was a part, contributed ¥18.6 billion to the ¥35.3 billion deficit the city had accumulated: the single largest component at 53%. The building was not among the assets transferred to the successor operator. It was left unmanaged. What the 2016 photograph records is the kitchen as the building's slow deterioration claimed it: paint lifting from the walls, rust spreading across the fittings, surfaces unchanged from the last service. No graffiti. The heavy Hokkaido winters do the work here. The gymnasium roof collapsed under snow accumulation in early 2021. The main building follows its own timeline.