Sheriffs' Office

The Sheriffs' Office stands inside the frontier town precinct of Western Village, a timber-framed false-front building constructed to evoke the look of an 1880s American main street. The facade, weathered and dusty by 2014, was designed to age authentically within its setting, though the decay visible now is genuine rather than deliberate. Western Village opened as Kinugawa Family Ranch, founded by Ōminami Ken'ichi and Ōminami Shizuko on family-owned land in Kurihara, in what is now Nikko City, Tochigi Prefecture. The facility was formally renamed Western Village in March 1982 and repositioned as an American frontier-themed amusement park. The frontier town precinct included a saloon, bank, barbershop, blacksmith, sheriff's office, hotel facade, chapel, and two haunted houses, each built with painted timber false fronts. The park expanded significantly through the 1980s and 1990s, adding a narrow-gauge steam railway, an Indian Theater in 1991, and an entire American Dream Land zone in 1995 anchored by a one-third scale Mount Rushmore replica at a total project cost of ¥2.5 billion. Animatronic figures populated the buildings throughout the park. The closure came on 7 December 2006. Nissin Debt Collection, having acquired the park's bank debt, had applied to the Utsunomiya District Court for an auction of the land and buildings, which the court ordered in September 2006. The official announcement cited equipment maintenance until late March 2007. In February 2007, the closure was extended indefinitely; all employees had been terminated in early December 2006. The park never reopened. When this photograph was made in 2014, the frontier town buildings were still standing. The Sheriffs' Office facade remained intact, the animatronic sheriff still seated in position behind its grimy windows, recording what the park had been built to look like and what eight years of closure had done to it since.