The Simulacra As A Tourist Trap: Touring The "Amusement Parks" of Tokyo

During my most recent trip to Tokyo a few weeks ago, I started to notice a theme emerging as I moved steadily through the city from tourist trap to tourist trap. Rather than reflecting my own personal tastes, this common thread seemed to have more to say about Japanese perceptions of leisure and entertainment. You see, Japan is full of so-called “amusement parks,” although most of these attractions are nothing like the theme parks that Americans associate with that term. Sapporo has a ramen theme park, Osaka has a theme park centering on local cuisine of the past and in Tokyo, an ice cream theme park and a gyoza theme park can be found in the same building. While many of these parks choose food as their subject matter, the main attraction is usually the space itself, which aims to create a completely immersive world within its boundaries.

Many of these parks, if not the vast majority of them, appeal directly to nostalgia, clearly one of the more powerful marketing tactics in Japan today. Of course, instead of presenting visitors with an accurate depiction of the past, they present a bite-sized piece of a fetishized past, sterilized for easy digestion; all of the charm of 1950s Tokyo with nary a homeless child or unsightly American G.I. in sight. History revised and then repackaged, for quick and easy consumption.

Perhaps the most interesting type of park in this genre is that which recreates space that never existed in Japan in the first place. Recreations of pasts that most Japanese have never experienced, appealing to an imagined sense of nostalgia. Anthropologist Joseph J. Tobin has gone as far as to identify such spaces as physical embodiments of Baudrillard’s simulacra, “re-creations of a past that never happened and things that never existed”.

I once read a really good essay on these types of parks, perhaps it was in this book? Were I able to locate the essay, rest assured I would make any number of grand academic pronouncements and would parade around quotes from any number of old men in tweed sports coats in order to legitimize those claims. Luckily for you, that volume is buried somewhere in the bottom of a box in a Wisconsin basement, so I’ll spare you the theory and instead, treat you to a few photographs.

Here we see what appears to be an Italian port town in Tokyo Disney Sea’s “Mediterranean Harbor”. Tokyo Disneyland is considered to be the nation’s premiere vacation destination by many Japanese and will be discussed at length in an upcoming entry.

Mama mia! The Italy of yore again rears its head, this time in the Toyota History Garage in Odaiba.

A shopping mall in Odaiba, adjacent to the Toyota complex.
“Little Hong Kong,” which occupies the top two floors of the Decks mall in Odaiba.

Sorry Oirase! It looks like Odaiba’s got you beat with a larger and more accurate statue of liberty.

Finally, the streets of jazz-age Tokyo in the basement of the Ramen Museum in Shin-Yokohama, which will also be discussed in a future entry.