Arcade

The arcade at Western Village is a long room of silent machines. Game cabinets stand in rows, their screens opaque with settled dust, their control panels untouched since the park's last operating day. Faded posters remain fixed to the walls, the imagery still legible in outline but drained of colour. Paint has lifted and peeled from the wall surfaces behind them. The photograph was made in 2014, eight years after closure, when the building remained structurally intact and the contents still in place. Western Village occupied a narrow riverside site along National Route 121 at the entrance to Kinugawa Onsen, in what is now Nikko City, Tochigi Prefecture. The park began in October 1973 as Kinugawa Family Ranch, opened by Ōminami Ken'ichi and Ōminami Shizuko with initial capital of ¥3 million. In March 1982 it was formally renamed Western Village and repositioned as an American frontier-themed amusement park. The operator of record was Ōtaka Enterprises Co., Ltd. The site was divided by the Togawa River, with the land to the west themed as an American frontier town and the land to the east as a Mexican village, connected by a bridge over a stretch the park called the Rio Grande. The frontier-town section featured timber-framed buildings with painted false fronts: a saloon, a bank, a barbershop, a sheriff's office, and a hotel facade. In 1995, a new zone called American Dream Land opened, anchored by a one-third scale replica of Mount Rushmore at a reported construction cost of ¥2.5 billion. In September 2006, Nissin Debt Collection applied to the Tokyo District Court for foreclosure of the land and buildings. The park closed on 7 December 2006. All employees were terminated in February 2007. The arcade, like the rest of the site, has remained as it was left.