The Happiest Place on Earth, and I Mean That

I could quit my job tomorrow, buy a metric ton of ice cream, and watch Disney films until my heart gives out. The animated ones—The Little Mermaid, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast. Not the Disney Channel garbage with teenagers choreographing their feelings. The actual films, with their actual sadness underneath all the songs.

So Tokyo Disneyland was a dream, and we went, and it delivered in ways I didn’t fully expect. I’d been to Disneyland Paris once and found it charming in a slightly melancholy way—the grey sky doing the place no favors, the whole thing feeling like a theme park trying hard not to be embarrassed about itself. Tokyo is different. The Japanese relationship with Disney is something closer to devotion, and it shows in how the park is maintained, how it’s staffed, how seriously everyone around you is taking the experience. Which should feel corny. It doesn’t.

The park wraps you in a sequence of worlds—Adventureland, Westernland with its frontier nostalgia, Toontown, Fantasyland where the classic films become physical spaces you can walk through. Mickey and Donald and Dumbo appearing not as corporate mascots but as genuinely beloved figures, because in Japan they’ve earned it through thirty-plus years of being embedded in the culture at every level. I watched a grown man in his forties pose for a photo with Goofy with complete sincerity, and I understood exactly where he was coming from.

There’s something about being in a place designed entirely around the idea that wonder is legitimate. Tokyo Disneyland doesn’t hedge. It commits. You either meet it where it is or you stand on the outside feeling superior and miss the point. I met it where it was. Absolutely zero regrets.