Sofa

Seika Dormitory stood on 3,100 square metres of state-owned land in Kohinata, Bunkyo-ku, central Tokyo. The reinforced concrete building, three storeys above ground with one basement level, was constructed in 1927 by the Gakuso Foundation, a body affiliated with the Taiwan Governor-General's Office. Its original purpose was housing for Taiwanese students studying in Tokyo, and it sat beside Takushoku University, itself founded in 1900 as the Taiwan Association School to train graduates for colonial administration. Known originally as Takasago-ryō (高砂寮), the dormitory was renamed Seika-ryō (清華寮) in 1946, the year after Japan's colonial administration of Taiwan ended. With no clear successor to the Gakuso Foundation, the building's ownership became entangled between Japan, Taiwan and China across the following decades, a dispute that the Japanese government declined to resolve. Monthly rent sat at approximately ¥8,000, with shared utilities. Around 40 residents in 30 households were still living there when a fire broke out in July 2007, destroying approximately 70 per cent of the building and killing 2 residents. The Kanto Finance Bureau sealed the site immediately after. This photograph was made in 2012, four and a half years after the fire and one year before the building was demolished in 2013. The room shows a sofa left exactly where it stood when the last residents left: fabric torn, cushions flattened under years of their own weight, every surface coated in a thick layer of dust. Nothing has been cleared or rearranged. The dormitory was unusual among abandoned buildings because the fire and sudden evacuation meant rooms retained complete domestic arrangements rather than the gradual emptying that precedes a planned closure. The sofa is ordinary. That is what holds the attention. It is not dramatic wreckage. It is furniture that waited, in a room that waited, in a building that outlasted the empire that built it by eight decades.