Study Room

In a study room at Family School Fureai in Yubari, Hokkaido, open books lie on desks coated in years of undisturbed dust. The pages have yellowed where they rest, mid-sentence, mid-lesson, as though someone simply did not return. Chairs remain tucked in at their stations. Natural light picks out the surfaces without warmth. The building that holds this room began as Yubari Municipal Asahi Elementary School, a new reinforced-concrete three-storey structure built in 1975 on the demolished site of Yubari Daini Elementary School, which had itself peaked at 2,827 students across 52 classes in 1952. By the time Asahi Elementary opened, consolidating three predecessor schools into one, that number had fallen to 351 students across 13 classes. The coal seams that had drawn more than 100,000 people to Yubari were running out, and the city was running out with them. Asahi Elementary closed on 31 March 1983, after eight years of operation. The building sat on the northern fringe of the city's urban corridor, adjacent to the Coal History Village that Yubari opened that same year as part of a pivot from coal to tourism. Around 1994, Yubari Kanko Kaihatsu Co., Ltd., a third-sector entity established by the city with capital of 30 million yen, converted the former school into Family School Fureai, a public lodging and group training facility. It was the company's first facility, and it operated until 2006, when Yubari's declaration of fiscal rehabilitation made continued operation impossible. The company formally filed for bankruptcy on 2 April 2007, carrying total debt of 5.46 billion yen. The tourism business that included Family School Fureai was the single largest contributor to Yubari's fiscal collapse, accounting for 18.6 billion yen of the 35.3 billion yen deficit that the city carried into rehabilitation. The building was not among the facilities transferred to a successor operator. It has had no custodian since. This photograph was made in 2016. The books on the desks were already old then.