In the 1980s,when I started touring and photographing school buildings made of wood, Japn was in the midst of a spcculativefrenzy known as the "economic bubble", with property and stock prices skyrocketing.Relentless waves of land development and urbanization were sweeping the country, leaving rural communities rapidly depopulated.Under the circumstances,most of the wooden schoolhouses built before World War II were fated to fall into disuse.With armies of village-born youths across the country flowing out into lage cities,the number of children in rural areas kept on declining year after year.

The result was the drastic downsizing of elementary and junior hight enrollments in those areas. An increasing number of schools were thus destined to be merged or abolished. I felt keenly the need to keep a photograpic record of the vanishing wood en school buildings.I trust it doesn't sound too sentimental to say that thosebuildings seemed to embody much of the past of the numerous boys and girls who apent their priceless young lives playing and leaning there. I could not help but feel that those old woodenschool buildings had surely stored up the memories of the sparkling past of generation after generation of youths.

So I was virtually possessed to take pictures of what I thought of as a "warm afterglow" pervading wooden schoolhouses in various parts of the country. As I was taking my photos, I began to receive tip-offs about such and such a school buildin about to be demolished or concerning yet another to be replaced by a ferroconcrete structure. This gave me all the more incentive to photograph the old wooden buildings, making me feel acutely that failure to do so would be tantamount to letting all vestiges of this aspect of the past slip out of existence thtoughout the country.The "scrap-and-build" folly was at the timerampant all over Japan.

On my photo-taking trips,I found that the wooden school buildings were wellintegrated with the ambience of their respective localities.In particular, the elementary scool buidings, where amall boys,strongly impressed me at a veritable embodiment of the wishes that people of the localities had had for the future.I I also came to feel that the buildings were saturated with the traditions and beliefs peculiar to their respective localities.

In that sense, each woodenschool building was quite individualistic. Many of principals of those wooden schools which were bound to be demolished seemed to wish personally to have them kept as they were.In fact,however, such buildings disappeared one after another.Most of the 230 or so old structures I have photographed so far have now been demolished or left desolate.

And there must have been innumrable other wooden scool buildings that I missed photographing before they vanished to remain only in the memories of the people concerned.I believe we Japanese should learn to listen in a humble way to the lingering cries of anguish that the wooden school buildings utter as they are broken doen because of the seemingly justifiable fad of making schools more comfortable and "modem" in appearance.