Pool Table

Inside one of Western Village's timber-framed frontier buildings, a full-size pool table has been left exactly as it stood on 7 December 2006, the day the park closed to the public for the last time. The green felt has faded and split. Dust has settled into every tear in the cloth, dulling the surface to a flat, washed-out grey-green. Broken cues lie across the table. The scoreboards are missing from their fittings, leaving only the brackets behind. Western Village opened as Kinugawa Family Ranch (鬼怒川ファミリー牧場), founded by Ōminami Ken'ichi and Ōminami Shizuko on family land in Kurihara, in what was then Imaichi City, Tochigi Prefecture. In March 1982, the facility was renamed Western Village (ウェスタン村) and repositioned as a Western American-themed amusement park. The site was built as a frontier town: saloon, bank, barbershop, blacksmith, sheriff's office, hotel facade, chapel. Timber-framed buildings with painted false fronts were constructed to replicate an 1880s American main-street. The park was operated by Ōtaka Enterprises Co., Ltd. and grew substantially through the 1980s and 1990s, adding a 914 mm gauge steam railway, an Indian Theater, and in 1995 a one-third scale Mount Rushmore replica at a reported project cost of ¥2.5 billion. Financial pressure on the Kinugawa Onsen district, compounded by the nationalisation of Ashikaga Bank in November 2003, tightened credit across the region. By September 2006, Nissin Debt Collection had acquired the park's bank debt and applied to the Utsunomiya District Court for an auction of the land and buildings. The park closed in December 2006 with an announcement citing equipment maintenance, but by February 2007 all employees had been terminated and the closure had been extended indefinitely. This photograph, made in 2014, records what remained. The pool table had been sitting in the same room for eight years by then, unplayed and unclaimed, the cues broken, the cloth past any use. Part of the Western Village series.