Gulliver's Kingdom by Mt Fuji opened in 1997 — Aum's shadow ended it in four years

Fuji Gulliver's Kingdom opened on 26 July 1997 on 370,000 square metres of land at the western foot of Mt Fuji — a Gulliver's Travels theme park built by a company backed by Niigata Chuo Bank, which had piled into bubble-era park projects. It opened two years after the Tokyo subway sarin attack, in a village whose name had become synonymous with Aum Shinrikyo, whose former compound sat a few kilometres away.

The stigma never lifted, attendance stagnated, and the bank that had financed the park went under in October 1999, cutting off its money. In January 2001 the park's properties were ordered to foreclosure auction; when nobody met the ¥3.1 billion minimum bid that March, operating became impossible, and the park closed on 28 October 2001 — four years after opening.

The ruins changed hands at a third auction in November 2002 for about ¥1.4 billion, briefly hosted a dog park that folded in 2005, passed to a resort company that went bankrupt in 2008, and has stood abandoned at the foot of Mt Fuji ever since.