Ghibli Park

Where it sits. Ghibli Park occupies scattered plots inside the Expo 2005 Aichi Commemorative Park — known locally as Moricoro Park — in Nagakute, a suburb east of Nagoya in Aichi Prefecture. This matters more than it sounds. The park was not built on a cleared site; it was inserted into an existing public park of woodland, ponds, sports grounds, a large Ferris wheel and a skating rink, and the Ghibli areas are separated by ten to twenty minutes of walking through ordinary parkland. There are no gates around the whole property, no fireworks, no parade and, by design, almost no rides. Access is by the Linimo, Japan's first commercially operating magnetic-levitation line, which opened for the 2005 Expo and runs from Fujigaoka on the Nagoya subway to Aichikyūhaku-kinen-kōen station at the park entrance. There is no dedicated car park for the Ghibli areas, which is deliberate.

How it came about. Toshio Suzuki, Studio Ghibli's producer, announced the project in 2017, originally as a park built entirely around My Neighbor Totoro. The site chose itself: a full-scale replica of Satsuki and Mei's house had already been built for the 2005 Expo and had been drawing visitors ever since. The plan grew through a partnership with Aichi Prefecture and the Chunichi Shimbun, construction began in 2020, and the park opened on 1 November 2022 with three areas. Gorō Miyazaki, Hayao's son and the director of Tales from Earthsea and From Up on Poppy Hill, led the design. The remaining areas followed in stages, the last of them in March 2024. At full extent the built areas total about 7.1 hectares.

The five areas. Each is ticketed separately and each has a distinct character:

• Ghibli's Grand Warehouse — the indoor core, built into a converted heated swimming pool that closed in 2018. It holds a long sequence of walk-in scene recreations staged for photography, a full exhibition space, the Cinema Orion which screens the same museum-only shorts shown in Mitaka, and the six-metre air destroyer Goliath from Castle in the Sky.
• Hill of Youth — an elegant small cluster centred on a period observation tower, the World Emporium antique shop from Whisper of the Heart rebuilt at full size, and the Cat Bureau from The Cat Returns built at cat scale.
• Dondoko Forest — Satsuki and Mei's house from 1935 rural Japan, furnished down to the drawers you can open, with a wooden play structure and a lookout up the hill behind it.
• Mononoke Village — Irontown and the Emishi settlement, a charcoal burner's hut, a forge with working bellows, and sculpted forest spirits set among real trees.
• Valley of Witches — opened 16 March 2024 and the most theme-park-like, with a life-size Howl's Moving Castle four to five storeys high, Kiki's family home, the Gütiokipänjä bakery, a carousel and a small flying-bike ride.

What it is and is not. Ghibli Park is a walk-through, look-closely, sit-down sort of place. The pleasure is in craft and detail — hand-painted signs, real timber, drawers that open on real contents, rooms lit as they are lit in the films — rather than in thrill or spectacle. Visitors who arrive expecting a Japanese Disneyland find the pace slow and the queueing awkward; visitors who come to look at how the studio's world is made find it exceptional. Photography rules are far more generous than at the Ghibli Museum, and the Grand Warehouse is built around that.

Tickets and planning. Entry is by date-and-area ticket bought well ahead, distributed by advance lottery through the official Boo-Woo system and resold by authorised agents; a combined pass covers all areas, and individual area tickets are also sold. Slots for weekends, Golden Week and the summer holidays disappear quickest. Because the areas are spread across a large public park, the practical schedule is one full day for everything or a half day for the Grand Warehouse plus one outdoor area. The walking distances are real — expect several kilometres — and much of it is on gentle woodland slopes.

Getting there and timing. From Nagoya Station, take the Higashiyama subway line to Fujigaoka and change to the Linimo; the whole trip runs about 50 minutes. Chubu Centrair airport connects by train through Nagoya in a little over an hour. April to early June and October to November are the comfortable months; Aichi summers are humid and heavy, and much of the park is outdoors and only partly shaded. Winter is quiet and cold but the indoor areas hold up well, and the surrounding park's Ferris wheel gives a useful overview of how the pieces fit together.