Moss Carpet

The classroom floor at Family School Fureai is no longer visible. Thick green moss has grown across it from wall to wall, fed by years of water coming through collapsed ceiling panels above. Where the floor once supported furniture and the movement of people, it now supports something entirely self-organised and indifferent to the building's history. The building that contains this room is a reinforced-concrete three-storey structure, erected in 1975 on the site of the demolished Yubari Daini (Second) Elementary School. It opened on 1 April 1975 as Asahi Elementary School, consolidating three predecessor schools: Yubari Daini, Teibi, and Fukuzumi. Their combined enrolments had once run into the thousands during the coal boom years; by the time they merged, 351 students remained across 13 classes. Asahi Elementary closed on 31 March 1983, eight years after it opened, merged into Yubari Elementary School as the city's population continued its long decline. The building stood unused for over a decade. Around late 1994, Yubari Kanko Kaihatsu Co., Ltd., a third-sector tourism entity established by Yubari City with capital of 30 million yen, converted the former school into a public lodging and group training facility. Classrooms were repurposed as guest rooms. Communal bathing facilities and dining spaces were added. The facility operated under the name Family School Fureai until 2006, when it ceased accepting guests as Yubari's fiscal crisis became public. The company formally went bankrupt on 2 April 2007, with total debt of 5.46 billion yen. Family School Fureai was not among the facilities transferred to a successor operator. It was left without a custodian. By 2016, when this photograph was made, the building had been unmanaged for roughly a decade. The moss on the floor records that time precisely: slow, thorough, and without any interest in what the room was built to be.