4__ Arakawa Amusement Park A fair from bygone days
Where do you find hyper-modern amusement parks? In Japan. They have the fastest and craziest rides. There are two Disney parks and one where you can find Hello Kitty and her friends. It’s hard to imagine that there was a time when people went to parks for the fairground atmosphere rather than their superlatives. If you like to wallow in nostalgia from time to time and yearn for the fairs of your childhood, then this is the one for you. Arakawa-Yuen was the very first amusement park in the Japanese capital. To reach it, take the Toden Line, one of the two remaining tram routes in Tokyo. The ride there at a leisurely pace will put you in the right mood for your trip down memory lane. When the Toden trams went into operation in 1911, the Shinkansen was no more than a vision for the future. The Toden trams run in the north of the city, on a network that is twelve kilometres long. The Arakawa Amusement Park was built in the 1950s to give space for play to the children and young people of a population that was growing rapidly at that time. The entrance prices were extremely low, and have remained so to this day: adults pay 200 yen for admission, children and senior citizens 100 yen. The price of a ticket for the rides is also 100 yen. Usually the numbers of visitors are modest, which means that you do not have to stand patiently in queues for a long time. Hardly anything seems to have changed on the Arakawa-Yuen grounds since the park was first founded. Even the rides, most of them small and not particularly fast, are survivals from an age when people still used that old-fashioned word ‘carousel’. In addition to these rides there is a children’s zoo with small animals and an area for angling. It is possible that older kids will feel a little bit bored here, but the younger ones and adults with a tendency to nostalgia will definitely enjoy this trip back to the last century. 16
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