School Room

A row of windows runs along one side of the room, and in 2016 the light still came through them, falling across empty desks and chairs arranged as if the next lesson had simply been delayed. Chalk dust had settled on the floor. Nothing else had moved. The building that contains this classroom is the former Yubari Municipal Asahi Elementary School, a reinforced-concrete three-storey structure built in 1975 on the site of the demolished Yubari Daini Elementary School, in the Fukuzumi district of Yubari City, Hokkaido. It was built to consolidate three schools into one: Yubari Daini, Teibi, and Fukuzumi elementary schools, all of whose enrolments had been falling steadily as the coal mines that sustained the city began to close. At its 1975 opening, Asahi Elementary had 13 classes and 351 students. Yubari Daini alone had enrolled 2,827 students at its peak in 1952. Asahi Elementary School closed on 31 March 1983, eight years after it opened, merged into Yubari Elementary School as enrolments continued to fall. The building sat adjacent to the Coal History Village, a city-funded tourism development that opened the same year the school closed, part of Yubari's attempt to reinvent itself after the mines. In October 1994, Yubari Kanko Kaihatsu Co., Ltd., a third-sector entity established by Yubari City with capital of ¥30 million, converted the former school into a public lodging and group training facility under the name Family School Fureai. The classrooms were repurposed; guests came. By 2006, as Yubari City publicly declared its intention to seek fiscal rehabilitation status under the weight of approximately ¥35.3 billion in accumulated deficits, Family School Fureai ceased accepting guests. Yubari Kanko Kaihatsu filed for bankruptcy on 2 April 2007, with total debts of ¥5.46 billion. Family School Fureai was not among the facilities transferred to any successor operator. The desks in this photograph have been here, in this arrangement, through all of it.