Barber

Inside one of the frontier town shops at Western Village in Nikko, Tochigi, a barber's chair stands where it was left on 7 December 2006, the day the park closed to the public for the last time. Wallpaper peels from the walls in long strips. Dust coats the tools. Debris has settled across the floor. Nothing has been cleared. The building is timber-framed with a painted false front, part of a full-scale set replicating 1880s American main-street architecture. The same block held a saloon, a bank, a blacksmith, a sheriff's office, a hotel facade, and a chapel, all built to give visitors the physical sensation of walking through a frontier town in the mountains of Tochigi. Western Village began as Kinugawa Family Ranch, opened in October 1973 by Ōminami Ken'ichi and Ōminami Shizuko on family-owned land in Kurihara, with initial capital of ¥3 million. In March 1982 the facility was renamed and repositioned as a Western American-themed amusement park. A steam railroad followed in 1988, an Indian Theater in 1991, and in 1995 a one-third scale Mount Rushmore replica anchored a new zone called American Dream Land, built at a cost of ¥2.5 billion. The park was operated by Ōtaka Enterprises Co., Ltd. and sat at the entrance to Kinugawa Onsen, a hot spring district that reached peak overnight stays in 1993 and declined steadily through the following decade. The nationalisation of Ashikaga Bank in 2003 cut credit across the region. In September 2006, Nissin Debt Collection applied to the Tokyo District Court to foreclose on the land and buildings. The official closure announcement cited equipment maintenance until late March 2007. In February 2007, the closure was extended indefinitely and all employees were terminated. This photograph was made in 2014, eight years after the last visitors walked through.