Japan had the most beautiful beach the world has ever known.

It was also completely fake. The Ocean Dome in Japan was an entirely enclosed tropical resort, and the water was always a gorgeous twenty-eight degrees Celsius. An artificial volcano erupted every half hour, and the beach was made of the whitest sand this side of Fiji.

Three hundred meters away, Japan’s natural shoreline - and real beach - sat unused.

If you are confused how this could happen, you are obviously not Japanese. The Japanese economy has a policy of “employment-for-life,” which means that industries that go belly-up can’t fire its workers. So when a premier Japanese company got priced out of the market with prohibitive tariffs - tariffs on the top-of-the-line icebreakers which they had been building for international shipping fleets, for example - they had to figure out something else that they could do. Something, perhaps, involving gigantic wave machines and seamless rivets.

They returned with a vengeance, and a tan. The entire company was restructured around a new industry: indoor water parks. People flocked from miles around, paying fifty dollars just to get in the door. And then they bodysurfed the most reliably crystal-blue waves in the world.

The Ocean Dome terminated operations on October 1, 2007. And the world is poorer for it.