Video: Forgotten piece of Russia in the center of Japan: Niigata Russian Village
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
In 1993, a huge theme park, Niigata Russian Village, opened right near Tokyo to visually cement the friendship between Russia and Japan and introduce local residents to a different culture. Against the backdrop of green hills, Orthodox domes towered, all around you could see Russian inscriptions, images of bears and nesting dolls. However, why is nothing known to modern tourists about this attraction?
British writer and photographer Michael John Grist recently visited this park and took some rather eerie shots. As it turned out, for 10 years of its life, the park could not gain popularity, and in 2004 it was closed. Ten years later, most of the equipment was removed from it, leaving only large buildings, which during all this time began to look frankly unimportant.
At one time, the central buildings in the park were the church and the hotel. The church has survived to this day: blue domes, frescoes inside and outside. It was built in the image of the Nativity Cathedral in Suzdal. But the hotel looks completely unpresentable - almost everything inside is burnt out.
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One of Michael's photographs shows a map of the park. So, there were indicated directions to the theater, restaurants, attractions, gift shop and even to the golf course. None of this has survived to this day. Michael found - all of a sudden - a mammoth sculpture - that's all.
In an abandoned park administration building, Michael found a large Niigata poster, either with plans for the future of a theme park, or with a new attraction - with golden fountains, a red Kremlin wall, churches with golden domes. However, reality made its own adjustments to the plans of the creators - visitors were simply not interested in coming to this theme park. It's hard to say what caused this - either a bad marketing program, or a lack of advertising at all, or the park itself provided an insufficiently rich program, but one way or another, now it is already a ruin that cannot be restored.
We also talked about a rather scandalous case when a Japanese amusement park froze 5,000 fish in its ice rink - read about it in our articlededicated to this event.
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