Hot Plate Tables

The dining hall at Western Village holds its furniture in the same arrangement it had when the doors closed for the last time on 7 December 2006. Hot plate tables, rusted now and blanketed in dust, run the length of the room. Whatever was set on them has long since gone. What remains is the infrastructure of a meal service that once fed visitors moving between the frontier town set, the steam railroad, and the other attractions of a park that had been running, in one form or another, since October 1973. Western Village began as Kinugawa Family Ranch, opened on land in Kurihara by Ōminami Ken'ichi and Ōminami Shizuko with initial capital of ¥3 million. In March 1982 it was renamed and repositioned as a Western American-themed amusement park, one of a genre of gaikoku mura, or "foreign village," parks that spread across Japan through the 1970s and 1980s. The park occupied a riverside site along National Route 121 at the entrance to Kinugawa Onsen, with a frontier town set of timber-framed, false-fronted buildings replicating an 1880s American main street. A 914 mm gauge steam railroad ran within the grounds. In 1995 the American Dream Land zone opened, anchored by a one-third scale Mount Rushmore replica built at a cost of ¥2.5 billion. Operated by Ōtaka Enterprises Co., Ltd., the park's fortunes tracked those of the wider Kinugawa district. Combined overnight stays at Kinugawa and Kawaji hot springs fell from approximately 3.41 million in 1993 to 1.48 million by 2011, a collapse driven by post-bubble austerity and the 2003 nationalisation of Ashikaga Bank, the main lender to around 70 per cent of the district's accommodation operators. In September 2006, Nissin Debt Collection filed for foreclosure at the Tokyo District Court. The park announced closure citing equipment maintenance; all employees were terminated in February 2007. It has not reopened. This photograph, made in 2014, records the dining hall eight years into that silence. Rust has worked across the tabletops. Dust has settled on every surface. The room is intact.