Mickey Mouse on Tokyo Bay

By John S. DeMott

The world's biggest Disneyland opens and the word is subarashii

The Japanese already have McDonald's stands, Revlon cosmetics plants, Coca-Cola, American blue jeans and dubbed Hollywood westerns. So why not a Disneyland of their very own? No reason, of course, and this week they get it. After two years of construction, the biggest Disneyland of them all opens Friday on 202 acres of landfill in Tokyo Bay.

Mickey Mouse is there to greet visitors. Also on hand are Minnie, Tinker Bell, Pinocchio, Cinderella, Donald Duck and Dumbo. So are Fantasyland, Tomorrowland and other lures for the 32 million Japanese who live within a 30-mile radius, as well as for tourists from all over.

At the park's previews, visitors gushed and oohed. Sporting beanies with mouse ears, they floated through Americana on a Mark Twain riverboat and Davy Crockett explorer canoes and railroaded through the Wild West on a train pulled by a steam locomotive. In a word, said one Japanese housewife, it was subarashii!--terrific.

Oriental Land Co., the Japanese real estate company that built and owns the park, began reclaiming land for the site 19 years ago in Urayasu, a town of 80,000 just outside the capital. In 1974 the company began holding serious talks with officials of Walt Disney Productions, but the negotiations were often tortuous. Recalls Disney Vice President Frank Stanek: "Both sides had to penetrate formidable cultural barriers." A deal was finally struck in 1979, under which Disney agreed to provide its technology, advice and guidance during construction in return for a share of the gross ticket take. Before it was over, as many as 200 Disney employees from the U.S. (expenses paid by Oriental) worked the site.

Kabuki was never like this. Nor, for that matter, are Saturday nights in bathhouses, or other traditional, some say less wholesome, Japanese diversions. Except for signs, which have Japanese subtitles under larger English words, there are few distinctly Japanese things about the park. Explains an Oriental Land official: "You simply have to give our Japanese patrons a magic sense of being in Orlando or Los Angeles right here." Just two of the park's 27 restaurants sell Japanese food, and they serve only sushi (raw fish with rice) and bento, a sort of Oriental box lunch. Tempura is nowhere to be found, but "spaceburgers" ($1.70), hot dogs and popcorn are everywhere.

Everything is as American as the bright red fire truck near the band shell and not far from the barbershop, sort of the way it was in Disney's home town of Marceline, Mo. When Disney conceived his California Disneyland, he strongly felt that before visitors got to Tomorrowland, Fantasyland and Frontier land, they should first pass through Main Street, which he described as "everyone's home town, the heartland of America." And so they will at Urayasu. Says Tokyo Psychologist Kazuo Shimada: "At this point, the Japanese are brimming with curiosity about America and the Americans."

The Japanese engineers and artisans who built the park nonetheless stamped it with their signatures. Main Street is spanned by a gigantic roof, a concession to Japan's rainy season. For a Western barn, carpenters used an ancient Oriental method for fitting wooden joints together precisely. Two shows are tailored to the locale: Meet the World uses film and animation in a revolving theater to give insights into 2,000 years of Japanese history, and The Eternal Sea, an 18-minute movie, whisks audiences past open-jawed sharks and over the ocean floor.

The Urayasu site devotes 114 acres to the theme park itself, with the rest for parking and services, thereby outdoing the California Disneyland, which opened in 1955 and has only 74 acres of park space. But the Japanese version barely noses out the 106 entertaining acres of Walt Disney World (opened in 1972) near Orlando, Fla. Naturally, the latest version is more expensive than the other two: $652 million, excluding land. Overall, though, the Tokyo park might equal or even surpass the $913 million spent for the Epcot Center adjunct to Disney World.

To Walt Disney Productions, whose earnings have slowed of late, the new park will be a money machine. The company has not put one penny into the Japanese project, yet for the next 45 years it will receive 10% of the receipts for admission tickets and rides plus 5% of sales of everything else. That, says Wall Street Disney Watcher Lee Isgur of Paine Webber Mitchell Hutchins, might add $25 million to $40 million to Disney's operating profits next year. The income should fatten Disney profits from its U.S. theme parks, adventure and family movies (TRON, Tex) and other activities, which ran to some $200 million last year.

The financial portents for the Tokyo park are highly promising. Two million tickets had been sold as of last week. Before the end of the year, ten million visitors are expected to pay admissions that range from $10.80 for adults down to $6.50 for children under twelve, about the same as Disney U.S. ticket prices. The crush is expected to be so great that, for the first time in any Disney park, a reservation system has been established so people can buy specific time slots in the park in advance, much as they would buy tickets to a concert.

The Tokyo park is making its debut during the 60th anniversary year of the founding of Walt Disney Studios, and at a time designated by the United Nations as World Communications Year. To the chairman of Oriental Land, affable Masatomo Takahashi, 69, that seems fitting. The park, says he, "should serve as another bridge for mutual understanding between the U.S. and Japan." And between the U.S. and all of Asia. Mickey Mouse is likely to be greeting folks from all over the Pacific basin, as tourists flock to Tokyo Bay. Like his U.S. counterparts, the Japanese Mickey is instructed never to speak. But he always manages to communicate. Says an Oriental Land official: "So many of our visitors have gone home thrilled that they have finally spoken with Mickey-san in Japanese."

--By John S. DeMott. Reported by S. Chang/Tokyo and Adam Zagorin/ New York

With reporting by S. Chang, Adam Zagorin This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.