Rodent droppings blanket the floor of a room at Family School Fureai in Yubari, Hokkaido, gathering thickly around an empty 6-compartment wooden shelving unit and a bed frame with a soiled mattress. Tattered light-brown curtains hang across a wide window at the far end, filtering the light to a pale wash across the debris. A calendar on the upper wall still shows months 10, 11, and 12.
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Rodent droppings blanket the floor of the sick room at Family School Fureai, gathering thickly around an empty 6-compartment wooden shelving unit and a bed frame with a soiled mattress. Tattered light-brown curtains hang across a wide window at the far end, filtering the light to a pale wash across the debris. A calendar on the upper wall still shows months 10, 11 and 12. 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 bed frame, the bare shelving, the calendar stopped on its last three months, the stillness of a room that was always peripheral to whatever the building was supposed to be.
04·FROM THE FIELD NOTES
Rodent droppings blanket the floor of a room at Family School Fureai in Yubari, Hokkaido.
Brett Patman
The series
Family School Fureai
2016 · 30
photographs
Family School Fureai stands on a hillside at the northern end of Yubari in Hokkaido. The building opened on 1 April 1975 as Asahi Elementary School, a new three-storey reinforced-concrete structure built on the site of the demolished wooden Yubari Second Elementary (Daini). It consolidated three local schools - Daini, Fukuzumi and Teibi - that had lost most of their students as Yubari's coal industry shrank. By the early 1980s enrolment had collapsed; the school closed on 31 March 1983 after just eight years. The building stayed empty until Yubari City's tourism third-sector firm Yubari Kanko Kaihatsu, established October 1994, repurposed it as the Family School Fureai public dormitory. In June 2006 Yubari City announced its fiscal collapse; the city formally entered financial reconstruction status on 6 March 2007 and YKK ceased trading 31 March 2007 with ¥5.46 billion of debt. The building has sat empty since. Inside there is no graffiti - only kanji on the chalkboards. Deer and foxes use it now.
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