the happiest place(s) on earth!

So, it turns out that “The Happiest Place on Earth” is, in actuality, dispersed across many different locations on Earth. By my count, there are no less than 5 Happiest Places On Earth, with Disneyland in Anaheim, Disney World in Orlando, Euro Disney in France, Hong Kong Disneyland in South America (just kidding), and, my new friend, Tokyo Disneyland.

In reality my family and I did not go to Tokyo Disneyland, per se. Just like how Disney World consists of several parks including The Magic Kingdom, Epcot, etc, The Tokyo Disney complex consists of two parks: Tokyo Disneyland and Tokyo DisneySea. We had heard from many websites and guide books that Tokyo’s version of Disneyland is essentially exactly the same as California’s, just smaller, so we opted instead to go to DisneySea, which is entirely unique and exists only in Tokyo. The Japanese think the land/sea dichotomy in the naming scheme is far more obvious than it actually is, and accordingly, DisneySea is a standard Disney amusement park with a prevailing theme of water and the ocean. Its centerpiece is a massive volcano which periodically hisses and smokes, and glows orange at night. The regions of the park are all aquatically themed to some degree: represented are Agrabah, the Arabian port city from Aladdin, Ariel’s Kingdom from the Little Mermaid, an Amazon River themed area, and a small facsimile of Venice, complete with gondolas. The best area without question though was American Port, which was divided into two subsections: New York Harbor, featuring a gigantic tramp steamer that looked like it belonged in King Kong, and- wait for it – Cape Cod.

So it goes like this. I live in Cape Cod. I grew up on Cape Cod. I leave the Cape, fly halfway across the world to a language, a culture, a world not my own, and settle there. Then my family does the same, and we gather up and travel to a small area, no less than a square mile, that was meticulously designed to look as much as possible like the area that we came here from. Bizarre. The fascinating thing is how convincing it was. To be fair, the architecture and the old-timey-ness of it made the place look more like something from Nantucket or the cape from 1895, but their hearts were in the right place. Lobster traps were strewn about, sailboats in an artificial harbor had signs on their sides saying they delivered cargo to Plymouth and Provincetown, and the streetlights were apparently manufactured in Medford. My life is strange.

Despite this incredible bit of serendipity and synchronicity from which I don’t know if I’ll ever recover, there was something better. In the Amazonian section of the park, I spotted a 1930’s-era seaplane with the registration number “C3PO” on the wing. Being the nerd I am, I recognized this as Indiana Jones’ plane from Raiders of the Lost Ark. We quickly hunted out the ride, which was similar to the one in California. You sit in a huge car that drives around a track, all the while being shouted at by a robotic Harrison Ford who barks messages of encouragement in your direction. The best part? This robot Harrison Ford was shouting to us entirely in Japanese. “Hayaku itte! Koko wa abunai yo!” Fantastic.