Seal Of Approval

The seal sits where someone last set it down, on a desk in a room that has not functioned as anything in nearly two decades. Dust covers the surface evenly. The relief on the seal's face is still precise, its design intact, the object itself unbroken in a room that is not. The building it stamps is Yubari Municipal Asahi Elementary School, opened 1 April 1975 as a reinforced-concrete three-storey structure on the site of the demolished Yubari Daini (Second) Elementary School. Daini had once held 52 classes and 2,827 students at its 1952 peak. By the time three of Yubari's schools consolidated into Asahi in 1975, only 351 students remained across 13 classes. The coal mines that had drawn a population of 107,972 to the city at the 1960 census were closing one by one through the 1970s and 1980s. The school operated for eight years before closing on 31 March 1983, its students absorbed into Yubari Elementary School. The building sat in the Fukuzumi district, along Hokkaido Prefectural Road 38, adjacent to the Coal History Village that Yubari City opened in 1983 as part of a strategy to reinvent a mining city as a tourism destination. Around late 1994, Yubari Kanko Kaihatsu Co., Ltd., a third-sector entity established by the city with capital of ¥30 million, converted the former school into Family School Fureai, a public lodging and group training facility. Classrooms became guest rooms. The gymnasium, which predated the main building, remained attached by a covered corridor. The tourism strategy accumulated debt it could not service. In June 2006, Yubari City declared its intention to seek fiscal rehabilitation, having accumulated deficits of approximately ¥35.3 billion. The tourism business account was the single largest contributor, at ¥18.6 billion, or 53% of the total. Family School Fureai ceased accepting guests in 2006. Yubari Kanko Kaihatsu filed for bankruptcy on 2 April 2007, carrying total debt of ¥5.46 billion. The facility was not among the assets transferred to the successor operator. It has had no custodian since. The gymnasium roof collapsed under snow accumulation in January or February 2021. The seal on the desk records none of this. It records only what it was made to record: approval, in a building that no longer approves of anything.