Verandah

The verandah is timber-framed, its boards painted to suggest an 1880s American main street somewhere in a mountain valley in Tochigi Prefecture. By 2014, when this photograph was made, the paint had been lifting for years, separating from the wood in long irregular strips and exposing the grain beneath to whatever the Nikko winters brought. Western Village opened in October 1973 as Kinugawa Family Ranch, a guest ranch on land in Kurihara owned by the Ōminami family. In March 1982, it was formally renamed Western Village and repositioned as a theme park, its grounds arranged as a frontier town: saloon, bank, barbershop, sheriff's office, hotel facade, chapel, two haunted houses. The buildings were timber-framed with false fronts built to suggest a mid-nineteenth century American townscape. The Togawa River running through the site was re-imagined as the Rio Grande, with an American zone on one bank and a Mexican village on the other. Through the 1980s and 1990s, the park expanded. A 914 mm gauge Western Railroad opened in 1988 with steam locomotives imported from the United States. An Indian Theater followed in 1991. In 1995, an entire new zone opened around a one-third scale Mount Rushmore replica, constructed at a cost of ¥2.5 billion. By 2003, the broader Kinugawa Onsen district was in serious difficulty. The Ashikaga Bank, main lender to a large share of the region's accommodation and leisure operators, was nationalised on 29 November 2003 under the Deposit Insurance Corporation. Credit tightened across the district. Western Village closed to visitors on 7 December 2006 after Nissin Debt Collection filed for foreclosure of the land and buildings at the Tokyo District Court in September of that year. All employees were terminated in February 2007. The park has not reopened. This verandah, photographed in 2014, is what remains of the frontier-town set when the maintenance stops and the weather takes over. The peeling paint is not a design effect. It is what happens to faux weathering when it becomes the real thing.