Books

On a desk inside Seika Dormitory, an open book sits where someone left it. Its pages have yellowed and grown brittle, coated in four and a half years of undisturbed dust. Sunlight enters through a grimy window and falls across the page. Nothing in the room has been moved. The book was not packed. It was not taken. It was simply left behind. Seika Dormitory, known formally as 清華寮 (Seika-ryō), stood at Kohinata 1-chome, Bunkyo-ku, in central Tokyo. The building was constructed between 1924 and 1925 by the 学租財団 (Gakuso Foundation), a body affiliated with the Taiwan Governor-General's Office, on 3,100 square metres of national land managed by the Ministry of Finance. Its original name was 高砂寮 (Takasago-ryō). It was built to house Taiwanese students studying in Tokyo during Japan's colonial administration of Taiwan. The structure was reinforced concrete, three storeys above ground with one basement level. Japan's colonial rule ended in 1945. The Gakuso Foundation ceased to function. The dormitory became an orphaned property with no clear owner, sitting on state land in a quiet Tokyo neighbourhood a short walk from Myogadani Station. It was renamed Seika-ryō and kept operating, housing successive generations of Taiwanese, Chinese and Japanese residents who had no formal right to be there but nowhere else to go. Monthly rent was approximately ¥8,000. The ownership question was never resolved. When Japan normalised relations with the People's Republic of China in 1972, the dormitory became the subject of competing claims from Japan, Taiwan and China. The Japanese government declined to intervene. The legal proceedings that followed dragged on for decades. In July 2007, a fire broke out in the building. Two residents died. Approximately 40 people were displaced. Most of what the residents had accumulated over years and decades remained inside: furniture, clothing, kitchen equipment, vinyl records, children's toys, books. Brett Patman photographed the sealed building across two visits in 2012, one year before its demolition in 2013. The book on the desk was still open.