Shimizusawa Elementary School

Shimizusawa Elementary School stands in Yubari, Hokkaido, its rendered facade weathered and its windows empty. Vegetation has begun working its way in at the base of the structure. There is no sign of occupation. The building is intact but unused, caught in the long, slow process that unheated Hokkaido winters accelerate: surface water finds the gaps, timber softens, and each snowfall adds weight to a roof no longer maintained. Yubari grew from a small basin settlement into a city of over 100,000 people on the strength of coal. At the industry's mid-twentieth century peak, 24 to 30 mines were operating across the Yubari River valley, and the city's population was recorded at 107,972 in the 1960 national census. Public infrastructure followed: housing blocks, health centres, commercial strips, and schools. At that peak, 22 elementary schools were operating across the city. The shift from coal to oil as Japan's primary energy source began in the 1960s. Mine closures followed across subsequent decades, and with them came population loss that no subsequent initiative could reverse. A tourism pivot in the 1980s and 1990s generated debt rather than recovery, and in 2007 Yubari filed for fiscal rehabilitation, becoming the only city of its classification in modern Japan to do so. The schools consolidated as the population fell. By the end of 2010, Yubari had reduced to a single elementary school, a single junior high school, and a single high school. The buildings left behind did not disappear immediately. Some were repurposed. Others, like this one, simply closed. Brett photographed Shimizusawa Elementary School in 2016. What the frame records is a building that has outlasted the community it was built to serve, standing in the quiet of a district the city is now actively consolidating into a smaller, more sustainable core.