Remember Gulliver’s Kingdom? Here’s a place just as weird. Seventy miles north of Tokyo in the town of Tochigi lies the Western Village, an abandoned amusement park that shuttered its doors in 2007.
https://gizmodo.com/welcome-to-gullivers-kingdom-the-unhappiest-place-on-e-5808855
The Western Village was built in 1975 and was such a draw over the years that its owner bought a $27-million, one-third scale replica of Mount Rushmore in 1995.
Over time, Western Village lost ground to amusement parks like Disneyland — with tourist traffic diverted, the park’s animatronic, shades-of-Westworld John Wayne, bloody ghost house, and fake Rio Grande were left to crumble.
Now the only visitors are haikyo (“ruin”) explorers like Michael John Grist, who took these pictures. You can see many more photos over at his website.
