Nara Dreamland
— — a castle the forest was already taking back.
Not only on a wall.
“A Japanese theme park modelled on Disneyland, opened in 1961 on a wooded ridge east of Nara, closed in 2006 when its licensing arrangement and its visitors ran out. For a decade the rides and the wooden castle stayed where they were, half-swallowed by the cedar around them, and the park became one of the most photographed abandoned places in Asia. Demolition began in 2016 and the site was cleared by the end of 2017. The artwork holds the version that everyone who walked the perimeter quietly remembers — the castle behind the trees, the colour the rust took, the silence that filled the rest in. — from the studio
Nara Dreamland, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Nara Dreamland sat on a hill east of central Nara, on the edge of the Kasugayama foothills, about three kilometres from Nara Park and the deer at Tōdai-ji. It opened in July 1961, built by Kunizo Matsuo after a visit to the original Disneyland in Anaheim, and ran for forty-five years before closing on 31 August 2006. The site held a wooden replica of Sleeping Beauty Castle, a steel coaster called Aska, and a wooden coaster called Screw Coaster. Demolition started in October 2016 and the parcel was effectively cleared by late 2017. The land is now redeveloped.
For the decade between closure in 2006 and demolition in 2016, the park drew photographers, urban explorers, and writers from around the world. The Aska coaster track stood mostly intact through the rust, the carousel kept its painted horses, and the castle's plaster paled in the sun behind a low ring of cedar. Trespassing was an arrestable offence and the site was patrolled, which kept the inside quiet rather than vandalised. Most of the well-known images were made in the early morning, from the ridge above the western fence. The English-language coverage peaked around 2014 and 2015.
Dreamland's decline tracks one decade and one nearby park. Tokyo Disneyland opened in April 1983, and Universal Studios Japan opened in Osaka in March 2001 — roughly thirty kilometres from Nara on the same rail line. Annual attendance at Dreamland reportedly slipped from around 1.6 million in the late 1980s toward a few hundred thousand by the mid-2000s. The closure announcement came in summer 2006. The wooden castle, the rusted coaster, and the empty carousel held a second life as photographs from 2007 onward, until the demolition contractors arrived in October 2016 and the long quiet ended.