TRAVEL. CULTURES
Japan’s Largest Theme Park
It’s neither what nor where you probably thought it was
If you find yourself in Kyushu (Japan’s most southwestern main island, just over an hour’s flight from Tokyo), hopefully near Nagasaki you can take a drive past Omura Bay and head over to Huis Ten Bosch.
I could give you 10 guesses and I would wager you would struggle to ascertain the subject of the largest Theme Park in Japan. I’ll save you the keystrokes and also the Dutch lesson, Huis Ten Bosch translates roughly to “House at the Woods” and the original is located in The Hague, Netherlands. It makes up part of the Dutch Royal Families trilogy of official residences.
See … You would never have guessed!
On arrival you cross a river, surrounded by very un-Dutch Mountains (being known for the flatness of the country!) and find a place in the enormous car park which is the first hint of what you should expect.
Heading towards the entrance you cannot help but be impressed by the huge Hotel Okura that overlooks the park with its grand entrance and brickwork that does a very good Impression of Amsterdam Train Station (by design, of course).
Once you have made it to the ticket booth and decided which of the many options for admission you need you can finally enter the Park!
You are first met by a map that shows everything on offer, and there is a lot. To put it into perspective the park is the same size as Monaco (but with fewer Formula 1 drivers). It is so large that it has bus and boat routes and you can also hire bikes to navigate your way around the cobbled streets.
The overall impression is very grandiose, the buildings are beautifully built and not cheesy caricatures of the original buildings. The canals and rivers are immaculate and the amount of activities, catering, retail, and accommodation on offer is overwhelming.
The feeling is of being in a very cleaned-up Amsterdam with no stag/hen parties or people trying to lure you into various bars, cafes, or ‘shows’. Although there is a charming spot where you can pose in the front window of a townhouse whilst having your picture taken, but I am not sure most visitors will realise what they are actually recreating 😬
Clearly, with a park of this scale, the owners need to make sure there is a lot on offer and with all due respect to the Dutch, this means they cannot all be related to their country for both legal and social reasons. You can take a gondola ride past a Turkish restaurant, or watch a live show where the dancers wear Dutch costumes, whilst dancing an Irish jig around a maypole like English Morris dancers all to a J pop theme tune (globalisation inaction).
There are the respectfully recreated windmills to have your picture taken in front of, that are surrounded by beautiful tulips, and the less historically accurate Tyrannosaurus Rex to visit as well (there is also a hotel entirely staffed by robot velociraptors, Henn Na Hotel if you want to check)!
Now the important question, why Dutch?
Why not ‘Luxembourg Land’ or ‘Venezuelan Village’? Well for a few hundred years Japan was a ‘closed’ nation i.e. it did not trade with the outside world and therefore had very little interaction with other countries.
However, in the early 1600s, the Dutch East India Company established a trading post in the area at Dejima (Japanese for ‘Exit Island’) which was the only place where trade with foreign nations was permitted. This arrangement carried on until 1854 when the Island finally became part of the city of Nagasaki and trade was allowed more freely between countries.
Thus a deep historical connection with The Dutch people led to the establishment of Huis Ten Bosch and since its creation in 1992 has allowed Japanese people to travel across the globe without needing to leave their country (very useful in the current global climate). I have heard that all the bricks used were imported from The Netherlands, which would not be a surprise based on the authenticity of the buildings, but cannot at the moment find evidence for this!
In conclusion, this is a great place to visit and you definitely need days rather than hours to see and experience everything on offer ... so maybe we should have bought an Annual Pass!
In fact, if you really want to enjoy the park you can purchase a house on the marina and then you can spend every day in a Dutch fairyland and I guess you don’t need a ticket!
If you want to see more of my travels in Japan please check out my Instagram (Where the images in this article are taken from).
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