Sports Storage

The sports storage room at the former Yubari Municipal Asahi Elementary School in Yubari, Hokkaido, holds the equipment of a school that existed for only eight years. Nets lie coiled across shelving. Balls and bats gather dust in clusters. Nothing has been moved. The room reads less like abandonment and more like an expectation that someone would return. The building that contains this room opened on 1 April 1975, a new reinforced-concrete three-storey structure built on the demolished site of the predecessor Yubari Daini (Second) Elementary School. It consolidated three schools, Yubari Daini, Teibi, and Fukuzumi, at a moment when Yubari's coal economy was already in serious decline. Opening enrolment was 351 students across 13 classes. By 31 March 1983, even that consolidated school had too few children to justify staying open. It merged with Yubari First Elementary to form Yubari Elementary School, and the building was vacated. The school's brief lifespan reflects a city in contraction. At its 1960 census peak, Yubari held 107,972 people across 24 operational coal mines. By the time Asahi Elementary opened, the mines were closing in sequence. By the time it closed, the population had already begun the long fall toward the 6,000-range figure of today. After roughly a decade sitting empty, the building was converted to a public lodging and group training facility. Yubari Kanko Kaihatsu Co., Ltd., a third-sector tourism entity established in October 1994 with ¥30 million in capital, opened it as Family School Fureai, the company's first facility. Classrooms were repurposed with tatami mat flooring; communal bathing facilities and training rooms were added. The building accepted guests until 2006, when Yubari City's fiscal crisis, a debt accumulation of approximately ¥35.3 billion, became public. 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 the successor operator. It was left as it stood. The sports equipment in this photograph has been in that room since before the building's last guests checked out. It records a school that closed before most of its students had finished primary education, and a city still paying down the debts of the decades that followed.