Piano

Inside the former Family School Fureai building in Yubari, Hokkaido, a piano sits under a layer of dust. The keys have not been touched in years. The room around it shows water damage, collapsed ceiling material, and the general deterioration that follows years without maintenance in a Hokkaido winter climate. The building began as Yubari Municipal Asahi Elementary School, opened on 1 April 1975. It was built on the demolished site of the older Yubari Daini (Second) Elementary School, a reinforced-concrete structure three storeys tall. The gymnasium behind the main building predated it, retained from the Daini school. Asahi Elementary consolidated three predecessor schools: Yubari Daini, Teibi, and Fukuzumi. At opening, 351 students enrolled across 13 classes. The coal industry that had built Yubari was already in steep decline; the schools were merging because the children were leaving along with their families. Asahi Elementary closed on 31 March 1983, eight years after it opened. Its students merged into the newly formed Yubari Elementary School. The building sat in the Fukuzumi district along Prefectural Road 38, adjacent to the Coal History Village that the city opened that same year as part of its pivot from coal to tourism. By around late 1994, Yubari Kanko Kaihatsu Co., Ltd., a third-sector tourism entity established by the city, had converted the former school into Family School Fureai: a public lodging and group training facility. Classrooms became guest rooms. The company operated five facilities across Yubari, funded by city-backed debt. The wider tourism strategy collapsed with the city's finances. In June 2006, Yubari declared it would seek fiscal rehabilitation status, carrying accumulated deficits of approximately 35.3 billion yen. The tourism business account was the single largest contributor to that deficit, at 18.6 billion yen. Family School Fureai stopped accepting guests in 2006. Yubari Kanko Kaihatsu ceased operations on 31 March 2007 and filed for bankruptcy the following day, with total debts of 5.46 billion yen. The building was not transferred to any successor operator. It has had no custodian since. The gymnasium roof collapsed under snow accumulation in January or February 2021. This photograph, made in 2016, records the piano as it stood then: keys thick with dust, the room quiet.