And indeed, at the Normandy one felt one was not so much in a celebrated hotel of international standing as in a gastronomic pavilion built by the French for a world fair somewhere near Osaka, and I for one should not have been surprised in the slightest if I had walked out of the Normandy to find it next to another incongruous fantasy in the Balinese or Tyrolean style.

--W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants, p. 119

At the Little World Museum of Man in Inuyama, Japan, one can travel the world in a matter of hours. Taiwanese farmhouse gives way to Navajo pueblo, Sami Tent in Sweden flaps right beside Berber Tent in Morocco, and indeed, if you're standing in the right place, fantasies Balinese and Tyrolean are sonically united in the overlap of canned gamelan and accordian music emanating from Toba-Batak House in Indonesia and Village of Bayern, Germany, respectively. Walking the exquisitely manicured streets and trails of this unlikely pangaea is an exercise in odd familiarity or confusion, amusement or smug derision, or perhaps a combination of all four into something like subdued awe.

I only found the place about an hour before it closed, on a sweaty, cloudy Friday afternoon. My primary objective was seeing the House of Yap in Micronesia, a reconstructed Yapese village the likes of which no longer exist on Yap itself. I had spent the previous two months on that remote Pacific island, doing research on the disappearance of traditional Yapese architecture, and had heard the only real example of it left was a 1974 replica constructed by imported Yapese master architects for an "open-air museum" near Nagoya. Perhaps I expected someplace similar to the shabby museums and ethnographic mock-ups I loved as child growing up in Los Angeles the falling-down Chumash village reconstructed outside a ranger's station in Sequoia, the first mission church restored on Olvera Street, the decaying life-size dioramas of Watusi mud huts in the basement of the Natural History Museum. I was anticipating an attraction equally rundown, unpopular, and serious of purpose; but after paying my 1500 yen (about $15) and passing through the entrance gate, these images of dusty information plaques and empty donation boxes were replaced by the impressive landscape before me.

The 2.5 kilometer circumference of Little World contains thirty-three houses and village complexes from twenty-two different countries (full-scale, immaculately maintained, and constructed with an admirable attempt at authenticity), eight restaurants and snack bars (some with slightly less emphasis on verisimilitude, such as the African "Safari Plaza" where "you can enjoy dishes of ostrich and alligater" [sic]), five gift shops, an open-air stage for ethnic folk performers, and a main exhibition hall filled with standard cultural museum fare (headdresses, spears etc). Costume centers also dot the vast terrain of the park, where one can "wear the challenging ethnic costumes of various regions" from Alsace to Korea. From all the promotional materials picturing smiling young Japanese women in daishikis and serapes, this seems a major attraction of the venue: being able to wear leiderhosen as one strolls through the faux-tavern, or a sari as one sits in the baked brick house. Fantasy, voyeurism, and role-playing are integral to the philosophy of the Little World. After all, "the theme of this large, open-air museum is anthropology, and it allows the visitor to literally walk into the lives of different peoples from around the world.

The concept of miniaturizing countries and cultures, of compressing the globe down to a manageable few miles for the entertainment and enlightenment (and consumption) of a particular populace, is hardly a new one. The World's Fair premiered in London in 1851, Disneyworld Florida carried the notion to apotheosis in 1982 with Epcot Center; and numerous time/place-specific fantasies have flourished in Colonial Williamsburg, Las Vegas theme-hotels, and self-consciously marketed Chinatowns and Little Italies. These constructed leisure environments use "Culture" to enhance their atmosphere, by establishng a set of visual and material signifiers to denote a particular time and place, and to connote a host of attached stereotypes, desires, and fears; in essence, to stimulate the excitement of the exotic. But in the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas and the Mexico World Showcase in Epcot Center, the true appeal remains a specific activity (gambling, thrill rides), repackaged in a totalizing novelty aesthetic that still serves the designated purpose of the space (slot machines set in classical statuary, a boat ride through a scary Mayan temple).

In Japan, however, cultural themes aren't merely a veneer for the main attraction, they are the main attraction. Approximately half of Japan's theme-parks are "cultural", with subjects ranging from individual countries to works of foreign literature: two of Japan's five most successful theme-parks, Huis Ten Bosch and Parque Espana (representing Holland and Spain), together attract 8 million visitors a year with their tulips and Picassos. Here, "Culture" itself is the gambling, the rollercoaster, the concept to be consumed, appreciated, thrilled by. Parks such as Tazawako Swiss Village or Roshia-mura actively (and effectively) market themselves as the next best thing to actually visiting Switzerland or Russia. Especially since the economic downturn, such cultural parks allow average Japanese to travel to "foreign" landscapes within their own borders that are faster, cheaper, and easier to enjoy. No packing, no passports, no long flights, no language barriers: just the immersion in pleasant strangeness, exotic architecture, food, sights and sounds before returning home.

Little World is intrinsically connected to this larger phenomenon of cultural parks in Japan, but also unique in its trans-historical, pan-global perspective. Not only does Little World create a microcosm of a few hilly acres, it collapses temporal boundaries as well, presenting the human world in a staggering simultaneity. A seemingly 18th-century Italian villa coexists with the aforementioned Navajo pueblo of the sort still seen in the American southwest up until the 1920s. Some are indeterminate as to date, and appear to invite interpretation the Peruvian Landlord's Mansion, with its lavish fountains and reinforced compound walls, lacked only armed bodyguards patrolling the long white-washed balconies to be mistaken for a more modern [stereo]type of South American "-lord"s mansion. And perhaps most significantly, Little World allows access to spaces that no longer exist anywhere in the real world such as House of Yap in Micronesia. Visiting that quiet village model, I felt I had stepped into a sudden manifestation of myth and the invisible past. After two months on the real island, studying the transformation from traditional palm architecture to tin and concrete housing, and from traditional village structure to more closed, nuclear family units, I had heard much about out-dated forms such as the family house, the daughter's house, the son's house, or the cooking house. But never actually saw them until Little World. At the edge of an artificial lake (representing the Pacific, I suppose), I found the very last traditional Yapese village on earth.