Dining Hall

The dining hall at Western Village occupies a large interior space within the frontier town precinct of the park built on family-owned land in Kurihara, Nikko City, Tochigi Prefecture. Hundreds of chairs remain stacked on the tables, left as they were when the park closed. Sunlight enters through broken windows, cutting across the dust that has accumulated over the years since. The room is large, built to feed many people at once. Western Village opened as Kinugawa Family Ranch, founded by Ōminami Ken'ichi and Ōminami Shizuko with initial capital of ¥3 million. The facility was renamed Western Village in March 1982 and repositioned as an American frontier-themed amusement park, one of many gaikoku mura attractions built across Japan from the 1970s to the 1990s. The park grew steadily through the 1980s and into the 1990s, adding a 914 mm gauge steam railway, an Indian Theater, and in 1995 an American Dream Land zone anchored by a one-third scale Mount Rushmore replica at a construction cost of ¥2.5 billion. The park was operated by Ōtaka Enterprises Co., Ltd. and drew visitors to a site that included a saloon, a bank, a chapel, a blacksmith, a sheriff's office, and two haunted houses, all built with timber-framed false fronts replicating 1880s American main-street architecture. A dining hall served those visitors throughout the park's operational years. The broader economic environment turned sharply against the park. Kinugawa Onsen's combined overnight stays peaked at approximately 3.41 million in 1993 and fell steadily through the following decade. Ashikaga Bank, the main lender to approximately 70 per cent of the district's accommodation providers, was nationalised in 2003. Nissin Debt Collection, having acquired the park's bank debt, applied to the Utsunomiya District Court for an auction of the land and buildings, which the court ordered in September 2006. The park closed on 7 December 2006, with an announcement citing equipment maintenance. All employees were terminated in early December 2006. This photograph, made in 2014, records the dining hall as it stood years into that closure: chairs stacked, windows broken, the room filled with light and dust.