Charred Piano

The piano is gone now. The building it sat in was demolished in 2013, and the site in Kohinata, Bunkyo-ku reopened six years later as a residential aged care facility. But in 2012, the reinforced concrete shell of Seika Dormitory still stood, sealed by the Kanto Finance Bureau, the fire-blackened interior preserved more or less as the 2007 blaze had left it. This photograph was made during one of two visits in 2012, four and a half years after the fire and roughly a year before demolition. What the frame records is a piano reduced to its structural form: the casing blackened throughout, the keys fused into distorted ridges, the original white gone. It is a domestic object that has passed through fire and arrived somewhere else entirely. Seika Dormitory was built in 1927 by the Gakuso Foundation, a body affiliated with the Taiwan Governor-General's Office, on 3,100 square metres of state-owned land in Kohinata. Its purpose was straightforward: housing for Taiwanese students studying in Tokyo while Japan administered Taiwan as a colonial territory. The building was reinforced concrete, three storeys above ground with a basement level, and it sat beside the campus of Takushoku University, itself founded in 1900 to train personnel for colonial administration. Japan's surrender in 1945 ended colonial rule and left the dormitory without a clear owner. It was renamed from Takasago-ryō to Seika-ryō in 1946 and kept functioning, housing Taiwanese, Chinese and Japanese residents through the decades that followed. Japan's 1972 normalisation with the People's Republic of China created a three-way ownership ambiguity between Japan, Taiwan and China that no government moved to resolve. The dormitory sat in that gap. In July 2007, fire broke out. Two residents died, seven were hospitalised, and approximately 70 per cent of the building was destroyed. Around 40 people were displaced. The Kanto Finance Bureau sealed what remained. The personal belongings the residents left behind, furniture, books, clothing, vinyl records, kitchen equipment, and at least one piano, stayed where they were. This photograph is what that looked like.