Tokyo Disneyland loses top-attendance crown for Japanese theme parks for second year in a row

Pretty much from the moment it opened, Tokyo Disneyland has been Japan’s most prestigious theme park. However, it’s no longer Japan’s most popular theme park, at least in terms of the number of visitors it receives.

According to statistics compiled by the U.S.-based Themed Entertainment Association and consulting company AECOM, in 2023 more people visited Osaka’s Universal Studios Japan than Tokyo Disneyland. USJ’s attendance for the year was approximately 16 million, up 29.6 percent from 2022, while Tokyo Disneyland had only 15.1 million visitors, though it also enjoyed a 25.8-percent spike in attendance compared to the previous year. Worldwide, USJ and Tokyo Disneyland were the third and fourth-most visited theme parks in the world, trailing only Disney’s Magic Kingdom in Florida and the original Disneyland park in California.

Not only did USJ have more visitors than Tokyo Disneyland in 2023, it achieved that feat for the second year in a row. But how is the Osaka park, which opened in 2001 and trailed Tokyo Disneyland in attendance for much of the time since, finally pulling in Japan’s best visitor numbers? In an interview with Shueisha Online, Meiji University business administration lecturer Megumi Nakajima offered a few theories.

First off, Tokyo Disneyland is kind of in a lull between new attractions. It’s been four years since its "Beauty and the Beast" expansion (pictured at top) opened, so its buzz has quieted down. Meanwhile, the new Fantasy Springs area, with attractions inspired by "Frozen" and "Tangled," was supposed to have its opening in 2023, but that was delayed to this past June, so it’s likely some potential visitors postponed their Tokyo Disneyland visit until after 2023 as well.

In contrast, Universal Studios Japan almost always has some sort of new attraction that’s just debuted. This is largely thanks to the smaller scale and limited-time nature of these attractions, many of which are based on popular anime or Japanese video game franchises. Sure, a "Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba" restaurant or "Resident Evil" haunted house may not match the splendor of a permanent "Frozen" castle, but they also don’t take years and years to develop and build, allowing USJ to quickly and flexibly give fans a taste of the world of franchises currently enjoying a popularity boom.

Nakajima also mentions the cross-generational popularity of series represented at USJ, citing the park’s 2022 "Sailor Moon" attraction as a big hit with women in their 30s and 40s who watched the ‘90s anime TV series while they were growing up, and also to an "Attack on Titan" attraction in 2015 being the first strong indicator for USJ that it could attract crowds looking for fantasies with more mature elements than the always-kid-friendly ones at Tokyo Disneyland.

Japan’s current inbound foreign tourism boom is also playing a part, Nakajima feels. It’s not hard to imagine that many foreign visitors don’t necessarily think of Disney when they think of Japan but most definitely do associate the country with video games and anime, thus making USJ the more appealing theme park to visit while they’re here, especially if they’re coming from a country that already has a Disneyland of its own.

One wrinkle to the statistics, though, is that while USJ had more visitors during the year than Tokyo Disneyland did, that may or may not mean that USJ sold more tickets. As Nakajima points out, Tokyo Disneyland stopped selling annual passes in 2020, and hasn’t made them available again since. USJ, on the other hand, has annual passes starting at 20,000 yen. Since adult ticket to USJ run from 9,400 to 19,000 yen, it’s pretty easy to get your money’s worth from an annual pass in just two trips to the park, and Nakajima thinks that those repeat visitors are a key part of why USJ is getting more visitors than Tokyo Disneyland these days.

Though Nakajima doesn’t discuss them herself, there may be some other economic factors at play as well. Over the past few years, Japan has seen significant increases to travel costs such as long-distance express train fares and hotel prices, stemming from general inflation, increased demand from foreign tourists, and travel providers’ zeal in recouping economic losses suffered during the pandemic.

With Osaka/USJ located in the center of Japan’s main island of Honshu and Tokyo/Tokyo Disneyland on Honshu’s east end, USJ is more easily accessible, geographically speaking, for a lot of people. While the Tokyo area itself has a larger population than the Osaka one, for travelers coming from west Japan it might not make a lot of sense to blow right past Osaka to go all the way to Tokyo Disneyland when they could just go to USJ, making things easier on their budget with a shorter, less expensive train ride and maybe even doing it as a day trip that saves them the cost of a hotel.

This isn’t to say that Tokyo Disneyland is on the ropes, as Nakajima says that recently the park has been deliberately moving toward providing an improved experience for visitors instead of increasing total visitor numbers, and Disney fans have long shown a willingness to pay extra for premium niceties. In terms of total visitors, though, USJ is now Japan’s top theme park.

Source: Shueisha Online via Livedoor News via Hachima Kiko, AECOM

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