Entrance

The entrance to Seika Dormitory in Kohinata, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo is where the building first shows what became of it. Paint lifted from the walls in wide sheets. Dust settled thick across the threshold. Sunlight came through the doorway and landed on surfaces that had not been touched in years, the Kanto Finance Bureau having sealed the building after the fire that broke out in July 2007, killed 2 residents, hospitalised 7 others, and displaced the approximately 40 people who had been living there. The building itself dates to 1927, when the Gakuso Foundation, a body affiliated with the Taiwan Governor-General's Office, constructed it on 3,100 square metres of national land to provide housing for Taiwanese students studying in Tokyo. Three storeys above ground and one basement level, reinforced concrete, built on the eastern side of what is now the Takushoku University campus. At the time of construction the dormitory was known as Takasago-ryo. It was renamed Seika Dormitory in 1946, the year after Japan's colonial administration of Taiwan ended and the building lost its original institutional purpose. It kept functioning anyway. Successive residents stayed on. Monthly rents held at approximately 8,000 yen. Ownership became a three-way diplomatic problem after Japan normalised relations with the People's Republic of China in 1972 and severed ties with the Republic of China on Taiwan, leaving the property caught between competing claims that no government moved to resolve for decades. By the time Brett Patman photographed the entrance in 2012, the building had been sealed for four and a half years. The fire had destroyed approximately 70 per cent of the structure. The entrance recorded here shows the remainder: a threshold still legible as a threshold, a doorway still admitting light, the surface of a place where hundreds of students had arrived and departed over eight decades, now simply peeling, settling, waiting for the demolition that came in 2013.