Nara Dreamland: the Japanese park that copied Disneyland

Nara Dreamland was built to be Japan’s answer to Disneyland — a theme park near the old capital of Nara, with a castle, a main street and a mountain railway, all modelled closely on the American original. It was a success for more than twenty years. Then Tokyo Disneyland opened, and Dreamland’s visitors simply stopped coming.

Japan’s Disneyland

Nara Dreamland opened in 1961, inspired by a visit to Disneyland in California by its founder. It copied the formula closely: a castle at the centre, a Main Street, a railroad, a monorail and a mountain. For Japanese families in the 1960s and 1970s, it was a genuine wonder, and it drew crowds from across the region.

For more than two decades it thrived, and it became a familiar part of childhood for a generation of Japanese visitors. Its position near Nara, with its temples and deer, made it part of a wider day out, and it seemed as permanent as the parks it imitated.

The visitors stop coming

Then the ground shifted. Tokyo Disneyland opened in 1983, and it was bigger, newer and closer to the vast population of the capital. Attendance at Nara Dreamland fell. Worse was to come: Tokyo DisneySea and Universal Studios Japan opened, and by the 1990s Dreamland was losing money and visitors.

The park struggled on until 2006, when it closed for good. Unlike some parks, it was not cleared. Its rides — the wooden roller coaster Aska, the castle, the monorail — were simply left standing, and nature began to take them over. The park became one of the most famous abandoned places in Japan, photographed by visitors from around the world.

Gone, but not forgotten

For a decade Nara Dreamland stood derelict, its castle and coaster slowly rusting among the trees. It was a magnet for urban explorers, and images of its empty Main Street and silent rides spread around the world. Then, between 2016 and 2017, the park was demolished, and the site was cleared for redevelopment.

Dreamland is a story about the fragility of a copy. It borrowed its ideas from somewhere else, and when the real thing arrived nearby it had nothing of its own to fall back on. It belongs beside Spreepark in Berlin and Hashima as one of the great Japanese and German ruins of the modern age — places built for a boom, and left when the boom moved on.

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Related places

If this one stayed with you, these entries sit in the same corner of the archive:

• Spreepark: the East Berlin amusement park left to rust — Germany
• Hashima: the island that ran out of people — Japan
• Consonno: the 'City of Toys' that never woke up — Italy