Sick Room

The stretcher in the sick room of Family School Fureai still holds its pillow. Dust has settled across the surface in a layer thick enough to record the years since anyone last passed through. Medical supplies remain where they were left, arranged on shelving as though whoever stocked them expected to come back. The building that contains this room opened on 1 April 1975 as Yubari Municipal Asahi Elementary School, a new reinforced-concrete three-storey structure built on the demolished site of Yubari Daini (Second) Elementary School. Three predecessor schools were consolidated into it: Yubari Daini, Teibi, and Fukuzumi. The gymnasium, retained from the Daini school, predates the main building. At opening, 351 students were enrolled across 13 classes. The coal industry that had built Yubari to a population of 107,972 in 1960 was already declining sharply; by the time Asahi Elementary opened, the mines were closing one by one. The school operated for eight years. On 31 March 1983, it closed, merging with Yubari First Elementary to form Yubari Elementary School. The building sat in the Fukuzumi district, adjacent to the Coal History Village that Yubari City opened that same year as part of a strategy to reinvent itself as a tourism destination. By the mid-1990s, Yubari Kanko Kaihatsu Co., Ltd., a third-sector tourism entity established in October 1994 with capital of ¥30 million, converted the former school into a public lodging and group training facility: Family School Fureai. Classrooms became guest rooms. Communal bathing and dining facilities were added. The facility was the first in the company's portfolio, which would eventually include two hotels, a hot spring facility, and a ski resort. The tourism strategy failed. Yubari declared its intention to seek fiscal rehabilitation status in June 2006, having accumulated deficits of approximately ¥35.3 billion. Family School Fureai stopped accepting guests in 2006. Yubari Kanko Kaihatsu filed for bankruptcy on 2 April 2007 with total debt of ¥5.46 billion. The tourism business account's accumulated losses represented ¥18.6 billion of the city's total deficit, the single largest component at 53%. Family School Fureai was not among the facilities transferred to the successor operator. It has had no custodian since. What the photograph records from 2016 is the sick room in the years after all of that: the stretcher, the pillow, the dust, the stillness of a room that was always peripheral to whatever the building was supposed to be.