Honky-Tonk

The Honky-Tonk saloon sits inside Western Village's frontier town precinct, a full-scale replica of an 1880s American main street built from timber-framed false fronts on a narrow riverside site in the mountains of Tochigi Prefecture. Alongside a saloon, the street included a bank, barbershop, blacksmith, sheriff's office, hotel facade, and chapel. The buildings were constructed with faux weathering applied during the build, designed to look aged from the first day a visitor walked through the gate. By 2014, genuine decay had long overtaken the painted kind. Western Village opened in October 1973 as Kinugawa Family Ranch, founded by Ōminami Ken'ichi and Ōminami Shizuko on family land in Kurihara with initial capital of ¥3 million. In March 1982 the facility was formally renamed Western Village and repositioned as a themed amusement park. Over the following decade and a half it expanded steadily: a 914 mm gauge steam railroad from 1988, an Indian Theater from 1991, and in 1995 the American Dream Land zone anchored by a one-third scale Mount Rushmore replica at a project cost of ¥2.5 billion. At its peak the park drew visitors from across the Kinugawa Onsen district, one of the most popular hot-spring resort areas in the Kanto region. The collapse tracked the district's own. Combined overnight stays at Kinugawa and Kawaji onsen fell from approximately 3.41 million in 1993 to 1.48 million by 2011, a decline driven by post-bubble austerity, competition from larger leisure operators, and the 2003 nationalisation of Ashikaga Bank, which had been the main lender to roughly 70 per cent of accommodation providers in the area. Nissin Debt Collection, having acquired the park's bank debt, filed for foreclosure at the Tokyo District Court in September 2006. Western Village closed on 7 December 2006. The photograph made in 2014 records what the saloon had become: broken windows, peeling paint, softening timber. Sunlight enters where the glass no longer holds it out, crossing surfaces that once saw costumed staff and paying guests. The frontier town was always a constructed thing, a set dressed to look like somewhere else. What remains is the structure beneath the dressing.