The World & I Magazine

Issue Date: January 1997

Opened in 1993 by the Tobu Railway Company, the park is extremely popular. Some 2.8 million visitors came in the first year alone, generating revenues of 400 million yen (U.S. $4 million), and as many as 38,000 tourists will visit the park on any given summer day. School tours are encouraged, and a variety of educational services are offered. All of the buildings reproduced are still in existence, with the exception of the Tokyo Imperial Hotel and Railway Station, replicas of which greet the visitor on entering the exhibition.

Like the buildings, the twelve hundred human figures that are used throughout the park are built to scale. There are more than a hundred types of model figures, in over three hundred variations of costume and dress; they sit in the natural setting created by the forty thousand bonsai trees used in the park. For the most realistic effect, visitors should crouch down to see the structures from a doll's-eye view. But most people are content to wander about, as if viewing the "world" from the vantage point of a giant 150 feet tall. Godzilla-style stomping on the cityscapes below is not encouraged, however.

The models are separated from spectators by only a rope and the visitors' goodwill. There was a problem with petty theft--the tiny figures must represent an uncommon temptation for visiting children--in the park's early days, but that has been virtually eliminated. Security would appear to be minimal, but seven tour guides are available to explain details of the many displays.

Each doll or its replacement costs around three thousand yen to produce. Though designed in Japan, the figures are manufactured overseas. The replica buildings each cost as much as fifty million yen ("the price of a mansion," laughs Mayahara). Japanese artists and model makers, many of whom had previously worked for the Toho film company (famed for its Godzilla movies), visited the original sites before beginning work on the replicas. Each complex of scale buildings took as long as six years to build.

The park has some notable omissions: There are no South American structures, nor is there a reproduction of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, for example. The park's directors would like to expand the project further but are constrained by lack of available land.

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