Snoopy and Woodstock

Two small figures sit on a shelf inside Seika Dormitory (清華寮, Seika-ryō) in Kohinata, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo. Snoopy and Woodstock, their colours still bright, hold their positions against a surface thick with dust. Everything around them has deteriorated. They have not. The dormitory was built between 1924 and 1925 by the Gakuso Foundation (学租財団), a body affiliated with the Taiwan Governor-General's Office, on 3,100 square metres of national land. Known then as Takasago-ryō (高砂寮), it was constructed to house Taiwanese students studying in Tokyo during Japan's colonial administration of Taiwan. The building was reinforced concrete, three storeys above ground with one basement level, and sat beside the Bunkyo campus of Takushoku University, itself founded in 1900 as the Taiwan Association School to train graduates for work in Taiwan. Japan's surrender in 1945 ended colonial rule and dissolved the Governor-General's Office. The dormitory continued operating, renamed Seika-ryō, sheltering successive generations of Taiwanese, Chinese and Japanese residents across the following decades. Monthly rent ran to approximately ¥8,000. Around 40 people remained when fire broke out in July 2007. Two residents died. What the fire left behind was a building interrupted rather than emptied. Residents evacuated with what they could carry. Furniture, books, vinyl records, kitchen equipment, clothing still on hangers, and objects like these two figures remained on shelves exactly where they had been placed. The reinforced concrete structure concentrated the fire damage on the upper levels, leaving the lower floors largely intact as a record of the domestic lives that had filled them. Brett photographed the sealed dormitory across two visits in 2012, one year before demolition. The building was razed in 2013. The figures in this frame are among the last evidence that anyone lived here at all.