When my friend Kevin passed
through South Dakota on a cross-country road trip a few years back,
I did the decent thing as a host and took him to see Mount
Rushmore. Why pass by the ninth or tenth wonder of the world and
not at least stop by? Still, it’s one of those things I can
only bring myself to visit when a guest is involved; I’ll bet
the people of Pisa avoid their cockeyed tower like the plague.
Since the vast majority of Americans have no idea even
what state holds the huge busts of Washington, Jefferson, and
Lincoln — or even who that fourth guy up there is, anyway
— it’s a patriotic duty to set the record straight.
(Teddy Roosevelt is the one everyone forgets.)
Kevin has
been living in Tokyo, Japan, for three of the four years since that
trip, and I finally visited him this winter. I followed eagerly to
the sites around Tokyo he chose, but made one request: that we
visit Imaichi, sister city of Rapid City, S.D. Imaichi is home to
the one-third-scale replica of Mount Rushmore, and to the Western
Village theme park.
As we surfed the park’s Web
site, Kevin and I prepared ourselves to mock this over-the-top
spectacle. We honed our “Howdy, pardner” as Kevin sounded out the
phonetic katakana characters for Restaurant Chuck Wagon and Cowpie
Café, which turned out to be the Cowboy Café.
We figured Western Village would epitomize Japan’s awkward
karaoke imitations of American pop culture, like the Japanese heavy
metal band that calls itself “Loudness.”
But as we
carried our Confederate-dollar-bill tickets through the fort-style
gate, my chuckle faded. After downtown Tokyo, which is like Times
Square to the nth power, Western Village was disappointingly modest
and disappointingly familiar. It was like driving across hundreds
of miles of farmland in South Dakota reading signs for the
alluring, enchanting, world-famous Wall Drug, as mentioned in
Time, The Wall Street Journal… only to
arrive at, well, Wall Drug.
Just an hour and a half north
of Tokyo, Imaichi appeared worlds away: quiet, subtle and middle
class. The theme park itself was a bit shabby; or as Kevin put it,
returning from the restroom with a crinkled nose, “Despite their
claim to being a Western Village, they don’t really have
Western toilets.”
Western Village is a destination in an
area without many destinations. It’s a good place to take the
kids over the New Year holiday. They’ll see Japanese actors
portray a shootout scene (using a bit more kicking than American
actors, Chuck Norris excepted). They can see a talking John Wayne
robot and even a real gaijin — foreigner sauntering around in
a Wyatt Earp getup. And across a creek dubbed the “Rio Grande,”
there’s a Mexican mission-style building and some shrubs
pruned into the shape of a mariachi band.
As much as I
had anticipated ridiculing the park for all the things it got
wrong, I had to shrug and accept these folks’ amusement. We
laughed at the Model T full of human-sized teddy bears, but the
laughter felt forced. Sure, it’s funny to see a robot John
Wayne talking in Japanese, but not as funny as it sounds like it
would be.
And then there was Mount Rushmore, looming four
or five stories high and facing away from the rest of Western
Village. Made of fiberglass, it was more weathered and darkened
than its granite ancestor in South Dakota. Inexplicably, a dozen
life-sized fiberglass Dalmations, German shepards and collies sat
around the base of the “mountain.”
The Black Hills and
western South Dakota are covered with attractions every bit as
kitschy and bizarre as Western Village. We’ve got Reptile
Gardens, Bear Country U.S.A., 1880 Town and, of course, Wall Drug.
These 1950s-era theme parks, in their various states of disrepair,
entertain those of us from the Imaichis of the United States who
are not rich enough or brave enough to see the metropolises of
other continents. But the real mountain, faced or defaced by Gutzon
Borglum, eclipses any karaoke version here or in the Land of the
Rising Sun.
An old man on the train back to Tokyo bought
us beers just for being American; maybe he was on to something. He
held our hands warmly but only knew enough English to say, “I love
American.”
I guess imitation is the sincerest form of
flattery.
Josh Garrett-Davis is a contributor
to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country
News (hcn.org). He is a South Dakotan temporarily
displaced to Brooklyn, New York.
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