Rodeo Coffee Shop

The Rodeo Coffee Shop sign is still readable. Hand-painted lettering above a dusty entrance, the kind of sign that would have been visible from across the park's frontier town precinct. A wheelchair sits on the overgrown lawn in front of the building, left there sometime before or after Western Village closed on 7 December 2006. Dust has settled across every surface. Western Village was built on family-owned land in Kurihara, at the entrance to Kinugawa Onsen in what is now Nikko City, Tochigi Prefecture. Ōminami Ken'ichi and Ōminami Shizuko opened the site in October 1973 as Kinugawa Family Ranch, with initial capital of ¥3 million. In March 1982 the facility was formally renamed Western Village and repositioned as an American frontier-themed amusement park, one of the gaikoku mura genre that emerged across Japan from the 1970s onward. The park expanded steadily through the 1980s and into the 1990s. A 914 mm gauge steam railroad began operation in 1988. An Indian Theater opened in 1991. In 1995, a new zone called American Dream Land opened, anchored by a one-third scale replica of Mount Rushmore at a total project cost of ¥2.5 billion. The Rodeo Coffee Shop was part of the Western Land precinct, the frontier town set that formed the park's original core, with timber-framed buildings and painted false fronts replicating 1880s American main-street architecture. The park's decline followed Kinugawa Onsen's broader economic unravelling. The Ashikaga Bank, main lender to around 70 per cent of operators in the district, was nationalised in November 2003. In September 2006, Nissin Debt Collection applied to the Tokyo District Court for foreclosure of the land and buildings. The park announced closure citing equipment maintenance; by February 2007, all employees had been terminated and the closure was confirmed as permanent. This photograph, made in 2014, records the Rodeo Coffee Shop eight years on. The sign is still there. So is the wheelchair.