Exploring an abandoned Japanese theme park

Less than two hours away from Tokyo is the UNESCO world heritage site of Nikko. This town has some of the most beautiful and important Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples built during the early Edo period, and you could spend days exploring them all. But by our second day there we were looking for a bit of a change of scene....enter Western Village, a theme park that closed back in 2007 and has been awaiting demolition ever since.

What is Western Village?

The park was built back in 1975 by a local man who wanted to bring a taste of the Wild West to the area. It started off small, with a few cowboy-like activities on offer, and slowly grew over the years. In its heyday, the park was split into three main areas: a Wild West town with clapboard buildings, saloons, restaurants, and an arcade; a more rural area with a steam train track and outdoor activities; and a surprisingly large replica of Mount Rushmore that doubled as a performance stage. It was apparently this last big-budget addition to the park in the 90s that drove the owner into debt and forced the closure of the park 12 years ago.

Getting into Western Village

From Nikko itself, it was around a 30 minute local train journey to a suburb that really isn’t on the tourist map since the park’s closure. The station is tiny and we seemed to be the only visitors there when we arrived at around 5:30pm. From the station, it was a ten minute walk to the park, and as we walked we felt like it was blatantly obvious to anyone who passed what we were there to try and do!

The first thing we spotted was a row of clapboard buildings lining a deserted path. We ducked into the path which still seemed to be open to the public, but it became pretty clear as we walked that the areas on either side of it were off-limits. There weren’t any official gates as such, but someone had improvised makeshift barriers out of tree branches, clapboard and other debris that seemed to have come from the park itself: we saw a smashed ukulele and an enormous cowboy boot made for a giant in amongst the mess.

We saw a possible way in via the bridge that connected two parts of the park - the Wild West town and the Mt Rushmore stage. We had to scramble like the classy tourists we are up a steep dirt slope, but there were no other barriers as we made our way over the bridge into the Wild West town.

Inside the park

At first glance, the park could have been any ghost town of the American West. It had everything you’d expect a functioning town to have: a sheriff’s office, a saloon, a whitewashed church complete with graveyard, a restaurant, a barbershop, covered wagons, and more. But then there were the quirky details: a giant fiberglass bison next to some stadium seating, an arcade with retro games from the 80s and 90s including a classic Whac-a-Mole that I fell for straight away, and some abandoned fairground rides.

And the creepiest element of all were the robots. It wouldn’t be a Japanese theme park without animatronics after all. The first robot we saw looked like a sheriff, stood casually beside a stagecoach apparently unperturbed by the fact that his inner mechanisms had been exposed for the world to see.

Inside the arcade, we came across an even more sinister scene: what was once a cheerful saloon populated by mannequins was now a ramshackle mess, a disembodied hand on a table next to a legless cowboy as a stripped-down barmaid served the drinks...

One of the oddest things about the park was its contrasts. We saw relics of the Old West mixed with modern-day graffiti, and ruined fairground rides next to beautiful blossom trees that nobody ever gets to enjoy anymore.

Did we get caught?

Yes, yes we did. We'd nearly finished exploring the Wild West area of the park when we heard footsteps and came face to face with an unimpressed Japanese man with a wheelbarrow. He must have been a groundskeeper or something similar, although what he was doing sweeping up leaves in a place so wrecked and ruined was beyond us. I don't know what we were expecting, but we played the witless tourist card and said a friendly "konnichiwa", to which he simply replied, "Private!", and we assured him we'd leave right away!

We headed back over the bridge towards the infamous Mt Rushmore stage, and took a couple of photos with what was really quite an impressive reproduction of the real thing, before leaving down the same slope we used to get in.

What didn't we see?

There were a few areas we didn't get a chance to see. Over a rotted and wrecked bridge we would have found the mostly demolished remains of the train tracks and outdoor activities area.

We also didn't venture inside many of the buildings themselves: only the arcade was open, all the others were boarded up and we didn't feel like prying our way in! We've never done any urban exploring before, so the idea of actually breaking and entering buildings, rather than just wandering into a loosely off-limits outdoor area, was a bit too scary for us law-abiding citizens!

Would we do it again?

Completely contrary to what I've literally just said, the thrill of doing something we knew we really shouldn't be doing, as well as the idiosyncratic creepiness of a Wild West town in a Japanese suburb peopled only by robots, was a feeling we'd never felt before, and within minutes of leaving we were dying to go back and do it all again. Will we become actual urban explorers now? Probably not. But will we ever forget the time we snuck into an abandoned theme park, got caught, and lived to tell the tale? No chance at all.