Mountain View

Inside Family School Fureai in Yubari, Hokkaido, this photograph records a classroom that has been empty for decades. Timber desks sit in rows facing a bank of windows, their glass clouded with grime, the forested mountain beyond filling the frame as though pressing itself against the building. Light falls through in pale columns onto the bare floor. The walls and ceiling show the slow work of water and time. The building opened on 1 April 1975 as Yubari Municipal Asahi Elementary School, a reinforced-concrete three-storey structure built on the demolished site of Yubari Daini Elementary School, which had enrolled 2,827 students at its 1952 peak. By the time Asahi opened, consolidating three predecessor schools, only 351 students across 13 classes remained. The coal industry that had built Yubari to a population of 107,972 at the 1960 census was already in its final years. The last mine closed in 1990. Asahi Elementary itself closed on 31 March 1983, just eight years after opening, merging into the newly formed Yubari Elementary School as the city's population continued to fall. The building stood vacant until around late 1994, when Yubari Kanko Kaihatsu Co., Ltd., a city-backed third-sector tourism entity, repurposed it as Family School Fureai, a public lodging and group training facility. The conversion was part of Yubari's broader attempt to reinvent a mining city as a tourist destination, a strategy that accumulated ¥5.46 billion in debt for the operator alone and contributed ¥18.6 billion, 53 per cent, to the city's total fiscal rehabilitation deficit of ¥35.3 billion. Family School Fureai ceased accepting guests in 2006. Yubari Kanko Kaihatsu filed for bankruptcy on 2 April 2007. The building was not among the facilities transferred to the successor operator. It has had no custodian since. This photograph was made in 2016, a decade into the building's second abandonment.