Like many a yarn, this one starts in a pub.

Allister Simpson had just ordered a handle at his Cromwell local when he got talking to a guy at the bar. Turned out the guy worked on a farm in Japan, got paid pretty well, and was looking for mates to join him. “I can get you a job if you want it – they pay for your airfare,” he said.

Simpson had just turned 19. Brought up in Queenstown, he had no farming experience. This wouldn’t be a problem, he was assured. So in July 1993, with a pocketful of newly changed yen and no responsibilities to speak of, he boarded a flight bound for Narita, Japan.

Twenty-four hours later, Simpson was shaking hands with two other Kiwi farm workers. The girl turned to him as the car bounced down the rural road in Yamaguchi prefecture, six hours south of Tokyo. “Can you ride a horse?” she asked. “And I said, ‘Oh yeah, my sister used to have one,’” Simpson remembers. “So, that was it. I was the horse guy.” Upon arrival at Yamaguchi New Zealand Village, there were surprises in store. Firstly, it wasn’t a farm. It was a giant, sprawling amusement park. An incredulous Simpson was shown the Kiwi-go mini-train, the go-karts, and the Canterbury gift shop. He took in the paddle boats, Restaurant Rotolua, and the faded posters of New Zealand scenery plastered to the walls. He was introduced to the handful of sorry- looking horses he’d be in charge of. He thought, “Oh my god. What is this place?”

There are more sheep in New Zealand than people, everyone knows that. Never was this more true than in 1982, when the sheep-to-person ratio peaked at a whopping 22 animals for every person. The bleating of 70 million sheep didn’t go unnoticed: farming was what we were good at, and it was increasingly how we became known internationally.

Armed with an aggressive growth strategy, our then-Tourism Department redoubled its overseas marketing efforts. The burgeoning Japanese market was a logical target, and by 1985 – the beginning of a boom period for international restaurants, artificial grass slides, truck rides and souvenir shops full of “Nyu-ji-rando” themed gifts.

And in the cashed-up Japan of the early 90s, these adventure parks worked. Hundreds of young Kiwis like Simpson were recruited to add a dash of realism. At their peak, more than a million visitors a year flocked to the New Zealand Villages.

Today, all but one of the villages – Tohoku – is closed. The last sheep was shorn in Yamaguchi in November 2005. Hiroshima lasted until 2008. The parks are now abandoned but for visits from hiayko, the Japanese name for urban explorers. Photographs of rusting bikes and dilapidated buildings are shared meticulously online, in a series of popular blogs on deserted places. So how did it get to this?

We’re sitting at picnic tables in a faux-Queenstown, the smell of barbecuing sausages on the cool autumn air. The lake’s visible in the distance, boats bobbing on the calm waters. The buildings in Queenstown are more Tudor-style than I remember, and I don’t recall a tinny pan-flute remix of the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” playing creepily overhead last time I was there.

I’m squinting and attempting to channel Fergburger on Shotover St when Captain Cook’s Endeavour drives past, its carriages packed full of people. Um, what?

“Oh my god,” my husband says, ill- advisedly attempting to eat his uncooked sausage. “This is truly disgusting.”

The illusion had really been shattered earlier, when the waiter asked where we were from. “New Zealand!”, we say, proudly.

“Doko? [where?]” he asks. “Nyu-ji-rando,” I say, using the Japanese pronunciation. He continues to look mystified until I pull out our map of Tohoku New Zealand village, pointing to the name. “Oh, okay,” he nods.

We leave our barbecue meal to take a stroll through Queenstown’s derelict alleyways. Peeling signs advertise sausage- and cheese-making demonstrations, but there’s nothing happening behind the smudged windows today. After a quick break in a restroom which features a New Zealand tea towel draped over a dirty-looking cot, we explore an abandoned hall. Rows of chairs are turned towards an empty stage, flanked by ancient gaming machines.

The next stop is Mountain Cook, where the main attraction is, inexplicably, a luge. There’s also a 3D experience room, which I guess makes sense as we do view things in 3D in New Zealand. Unfortunately, the decrepit “theatre” looks more like the kind of place Cheryl West would throw a party, complete with plastic chairs and a ripped tarpaulin over the entrance.

Bizarrely, even if you were momentarily convinced you were strolling through the Southern Alps, there’s too much Japanese kitsch and completely unrelated paraphernalia around for the illusion to last long.

If the paddle boat in the shape of the giant panda doesn’t spoil your serenity, then the AmPanMan ride and the archery range will.

As we walk towards O-kurando (Auckland) village, there’s a commotion. A farm employee has been spotted leading a photogenic llama, and is soon being followed by a small, camera toting crowd and the excited calls of “kawaii” (cute) and “sugoi” (amazing).

But sheep are clearly the main drawcard. Everywhere you turn there’s another adorable cartoon sheep clambering aboard a luge or a go-kart, and soft-toy lambs easily outnumber visitors in the gift shop. Other souvenirs include kiwifruit soft toys, cow soft toys, llama soft toys, and an All Blacks jersey circa-1980 that’s a steal at $250.

When we do finally see real sheep, they’re on their most bizarre behaviour. As we pass their pen they leap up like dogs, fixing us with inquisitive gazes.

As we’re leaving, I overhear a fellow tourist whisper to her friend, in Japanese: “What are those foreigners doing here?”

Paul Bowen, former joint managing director of Rotorua’s Agrodome and current farming consultant says that when the farms were built, “they were pretty major structures, with lakes and boats and restaurants and things that were pretty huge. The guy Kumon had a lot of money, in the [economic] bubble in the mid-90s.”

On the back of a six-month Japanese expo that had attracted huge interest, Agrodome began contracting to the farm parks in 1989. Bowen imported champion rams of different breeds, and over the next four years provided around 24 experienced staff specifically to run the sheep shows. And they were incredibly popular. During Golden Week, Japan’s public holiday period, Bowen estimated more than 25,000 people would see the performances.

In a commodity-driven, plastic world, touching real sheep was a huge novelty, Bowen said. “The [Japanese] just know New Zealand’s a beautiful country, and they think sheep are a big part of it. They had a real love for the sheep, and the sheep shearing just blew them away.” And it wasn’t restricted to sheep. “You could rent a dog,” remembers Matthew Saywell, who featured in many a Japanese holiday snap as the Steinlager-swilling Kiwi on the Yamaguchi farm in 1999.

“On summer holidays and weekends, you could pay to run around with a dog for half an hour, throw it a stick and stuff. It was strange, I thought it was really bizarre.”

Aside from its surreal nature, the job was a young traveller’s dream. Their flights were paid, the Japanese staff were super-friendly, and there were other New Zealanders keen to get on the piss at the weekends. In fact, seeing hungover Kiwis at work probably amped up the authenticity, Saywell laughs.

“That would have given them a bit of an idea what real sheep farmers were like, I suppose. I mean, we probably got away with a fair bit over there. The sheep guy missed a few shows – he couldn’t get up sometimes, eh, after he’d had too much of a hard night. They’d be knocking on the door like, ‘Sorry Mr Chris to wake you up, can you please come and do the show,’ and there would be 400 people just standing there waiting.”

The park’s main downfall was probably that, once you’d been there, there was really no reason to return, he said. And, as Japanese urban explorer Jing Lain Meow writes in her Totoro Times blog: “I can imagine this being quite a nice hang-out place around crowded Tokyo, but being in the countryside already, why would you want to pay 600 yen [$NZ7.25] to walk in a park?”

For Agrodome at least, things began to sour pretty early on. The sheep were ageing, Farm Inc wasn’t keen to invest any more money, and the company was basically “hiring anyone with a working visa”, says Bowen.

In 1994, he packed up his sheep and had soon signed a contract with Mother Farm, a 122ha ranch in Chiba prefecture owned by Hisakichi Maeda, the founder of Tokyo Tower. He says he didn’t hear any more about Farm Inc until years later, when he was contacted by New Zealand animal welfare groups about complaints of animal mistreatment. “I got calls – they’d been limping along with some sort of show, but it had nothing to do with us. We did a favour for them doing those shows and we weren’t paid very much money, and as soon as we got another offer we moved on.

“Honestly, those parks started deteriorating quite quickly. It cost a lot of money to keep them going, and they weren’t prepared to spend it. And when the bubble burst about 1998, she was over, man.”

It was around that time that staff at the Shikoku farm contacted New Zealand authorities. “The horses were starved and so badly treated, and the rabbits had been left to breed indiscriminately, some had no eyes and they were so hungry they were eating each other,” former Shikoku farm employee Emma Williamson told thepulse.org.nz.

Williamson and a friend took photographs of the nightmarish animals, enlisting the help of the International League for the Protection of Horses to get animal safety experts into the parks. Allister Simpson and Matthew Saywell agree the animal care was substandard – more due to a lack of knowledge than deliberate maliciousness. “The cows were always tied up; one escaped from its noose once, it was just stumbling round because it didn’t know how to walk,” Simpson says. “I’d be thinking ‘Geez, if I paid to get into this shithole I wouldn’t be very happy,’ but the people seemed to be enjoying themselves because they could get up close to the horses.”

But in the end, he drew the line. When one horse was quite clearly in distress, he pleaded with management to put the creature out of its misery. Nothing was done. “[The next morning] it was dead, its insides were all over the floor. I stormed up to the office and let them have it,” says Simpson, now an immigration consultant.

“I told them what a disgrace it was to New Zealand and I took my bags and left. I think I was too wound up for them to even worry about the airfare.

“They gave me a bow and my pay and said ‘Ganbatte kudasai’ [try your best, please] and I left.”

Reports from other visiting Kiwis were mixed at best. In Under the Osakan Sun, Hamish Beaton describes his horror at watching a sheep show that bordered on farce. “As the ragged old sheep got cut and started bleeding, some children in the audience began to sob loudly. Undeterred, [the shearer] told the poor creature to ‘stop fucking moving’, and ‘sodding well quiet down’.

“Then, to my relief, the show was over… I quickly raced away before anyone could… mis-identify me as a psychotic New Zealand farmer.” And former Otago University Student’s Association president Chris Tozer visited Yamaguchi in 1999, writing in the Otago Daily Times of the absurd experience that culminated in his sighting of the “extremely rare but beautiful New Zealand monkey”.

But, even as late as 2003, Farm Inc was still recruiting young Kiwis. Samuel Wright answered an advertisement in the Timaru Herald that year, and was one of a 15-strong group flown to Japan. He would often work two or three sheep shows a day, to crowds of several hundred – as well as looking after six cows, 30 sheep and the monkey. While Wright had a great time and made a lot of Japanese friends, he says the lack of knowledge about farming techniques was still an issue. “I mean, yeah. That’s probably why they closed.”

Farm Inc still runs a dozen themed parks in Japan, including\ the French-province-themed Soleil Hills, and the German village Akagi Kronenburg. In 2010, the company had a reported 700 employees. Through a translator, Farm Inc head operations manager Takeshi Sasamotosays there have never been any animal welfare issues on the New Zealand farms.

“There have been no complaints made about animal mistreatment, and it has been 23 years since these parks [were first opened]. Currently, all 12 farm parks that Farm Inc runs do not mistreat animals.”

Sasamoto says that, during its peak year in 1991, the Tohoku Village attracted 341,000 visitors. But he would not provide current visitor numbers, talk about what led to the closure of the other parks, or state plans for the future of the remaining village. There are currently no Kiwis working there.

Saywell, who now runs a dairy farm in Chile, says he always thought the parks were a wasted opportunity for New Zealand tourism. “The whole concept of the park, it could have been done so much better if it had been thought out from a New Zealand point of view – about attracting people to New Zealand – rather than a Japanese businessman coming over and trying to make a buck out of something he saw on a holiday.”

Tourism New Zealand’s regional manager for Japan and Korea, Nick Mudge, says the popularity of sheep shows in Japan could be traced back to New Zealand’s pavilion at the Osaka expo in 1970, which spawned many copycats.

Asked if the depiction of New Zealand by Farm Inc or similar tourism operators could be detrimental to our image, Mudge said it was not a concern. “The Japanese, and indeed all other nationalities, understand that a genuine New Zealand experience can only take place in New Zealand.

“Feedback to Tourism New Zealand staff over the years has been that many children attend these shows and have their interests in New Zealand raised as a result: students who have studied in New Zealand report their visit happened because their parents took them to a farm show and they fell in love with the idea of wanting to go to see the real thing.” While Tourism NZ had some control of the country’s image and the use of the silver fern – particularly at home and in Australia – it was difficult to exert it internationally, he said.

In April last year, Mudge attended the opening of the Nasu Animal Kingdom New Zealand Farm Show in the Kanto region, run by Kiwi company Rossanco Ltd NZ. Agrodome continues to perform sheep shows at Mother Farm, attracting more than a million tourists a year.

Tourism NZ was aware of one other New Zealand theme park in Asia – a “Rotorua town” in Nanjing City, China. But in recent years, Tourism NZ’s focus has switched from promoting the country as a scenic, agricultural utopia. The impetus is now on thrills and adventure. It’s likely the version of New Zealand that Wataru Kumon tried so hard to reproduce doesn’t exist anymore. It’s possible it never did. But, at least for now, you can still visit a tiny corner of northern Japan and pay 600 yen to see what the end of a dream looks like.

Upping the excitement

While New Zealand’s agriculture and open landscapes are still attractive to the Japanese, Tourism New Zealand has switched focus to promote the country as a more vibrant, thrilling place for a younger demographic, says Tourism New Zealand’s regional manager for Japan and Korea, Nick Mudge.

The number of Japanese tourists visiting New Zealand took a dive in 2011 following the Tohoku earthquake, but numbers had climbed by nearly five percent to 72,080 in 2012.

It’s still a long way from the average 140,000 tourists who came here each year during the 90s, or the 173,000 that visited during the peak in 2003. But Mudge is confident the market is in good shape. Air New Zealand doubled the number of charter flights from Japan’s regions this year to 14, a sign of confidence in demand.

The target tourist now was the Japanese “Yama [mountain] girl” – a young, fun seeking woman with disposable income looking for an exciting experience.

“We’re starting to actively represent New Zealand as a much more exciting place, as somewhere you can interact with nature, have some fun and make friends.”

This story was first published in North & South in 2011.