Games

The game room at Western Village holds its contents exactly as they were left. Coin-operated arcade machines and claw cranes line the floor in rows, their moulded plastic housings still carrying colour. Debris covers the tiles between them. Natural light reaches the far end of the room through an open door, the only movement in a space that has otherwise been still since December 2006. Western Village opened in October 1973 as Kinugawa Family Ranch (鬼怒川ファミリー牧場), founded by Ōminami Ken'ichi and Ōminami Shizuko on family-owned land in Kurihara, Nikko City (then Imaichi City), Tochigi Prefecture. The facility was formally renamed Western Village (ウェスタン村) in March 1982 and repositioned as an American frontier-themed amusement park. Over the following decades it expanded to include three zones: Western Land, Event Plaza, and American Dream Land, the last of which opened in 1995 around a one-third scale replica of Mount Rushmore at a reported project cost of ¥2.5 billion. The park was operated throughout by Ōtaka Enterprises Co., Ltd. under the Ōminami family. Its fortunes tracked those of the wider Kinugawa Onsen district: the nationalisation of Ashikaga Bank in November 2003 cut credit to regional tourism operators across the area, and combined overnight stays at Kinugawa and Kawaji hot springs fell from approximately 3.41 million in 1993 to 1.48 million by 2011. Nissin Debt Collection, having acquired the park's bank debt, applied to the Tokyo District Court for foreclosure in September 2006. The park closed to the public on 7 December 2006. All employees were terminated in February 2007. This photograph was made in 2014, eight years into that closure. The machines remain. The colour in the plastic has not gone. What the frame records is not ruin so much as suspension.