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The story
Starting September 1, Tokyo Disney Resort will expand its paid attraction-reservation service “Premier Access” to a total of 16 facilities, with rides like “Soarin’” rising from ¥2,000 to ¥2,500 per use and “Journey to the Center of the Earth” going from ¥1,500 to ¥2,000. Reactions on 5ch were split, ranging from “Where did Walt’s philosophy go?” to “It’s still cheap for foreigners with the weak yen” and “Fine by me, it boosts spending per guest.”
Disney Premier Access is a paid service that lets guests reserve a specific experience time and entry slot at eligible attractions. Starting September 1, Tokyo Disneyland’s “Big Thunder Mountain,” “Pooh’s Hunny Hunt,” “Monsters, Inc. Ride & Go Seek!,” and “Haunted Mansion,” along with Tokyo DisneySea’s “Raging Spirits” and “Indiana Jones Adventure: Temple of the Crystal Skull,” will be added, bringing the total to 16 attractions.
The attractions getting price changes this round are “Beauty and the Beast: Magical Journey,” “Soarin’: Fantastic Flight,” and “Anna and Elsa’s Frozen Journey,” which will rise from ¥2,000 to ¥2,500 per use. “Journey to the Center of the Earth” will go from ¥1,500 to ¥2,000 per use.
Source: news.mixi.jp / Original article here
What people said
Do you even know what Walt Disney actually believed in?
FastPass wasn't invented until decades after Walt died.
You can still ride, just stand in line.
What used to be a free reservation system just became a paid one.
It's still unlimited rides — it's just that if you want to cut your wait time, you now pay per attraction.
If fewer people went, you wouldn't need to pay extra just to get in smoothly, lol
Now that you mention it, there was talk that it's mostly middle-aged women who love Disneyland.
Nope. These days Disney is just chubby, lonely middle-aged people throwing money around to have fun.
Even so, the reality is there are still plenty of families with kids and students going.
The people who rush in first are the ones staying at the hotel anyway, so they're already spending about that much.
Say "Mickey" too carelessly and you'll get sued, right?
Can't they just rent them? People have always either bought or rented the DVDs.
Isn't that just true of your own tiny little bubble?
You don't really need to know the movies — plenty of kids just like the rides themselves.
Isn't that only during the Haunted Mansion's Nightmare Before Christmas overlay?
Nice one. Gotta admit, that's a good pun.
People have been making that same joke forever — do they seriously think they're the first to come up with it?
It's actually the cheapest Disney park in the world — about half the price of others. It's not that Disney is expensive, it's that the yen is too weak and wages haven't budged.
Apparently it's still dirt cheap for foreign visitors. How did Japan end up like this…
Just tap away on your phone and get your dopamine hits that way.
Go hit up Kasai Rinkai Park right next door instead.
Background and Key Points
Tokyo Disney Resort’s price restructuring illustrates a broader pattern in Japanese theme-park economics. Premier Access is the paid successor to the old FastPass, which was free and simply required guests to grab a timed ticket earlier in the day. When Tokyo Disney phased FastPass out and introduced paid reservations, it followed Disney’s US parks (Genie+, Lightning Lane), but the base admission ticket has also climbed steeply over the past decade—well beyond wage growth in Japan. Combined with roughly 100 yen-to-the-dollar becoming 145-150+, a park that was once mid-priced by international standards is now, as posters note, one of the cheapest major Disney destinations for foreign tourists paying in dollars or euros, even as it becomes steadily less affordable for Japanese families paying in yen.
The thread’s actual fault line wasn’t whether Premier Access itself is good or bad—most posters accepted that unlimited standard-line riding still exists—but whether the *cumulative* cost (entry + hotel + multiple Premier Access purchases, easily ¥10,000+ per person per day) has pushed the park out of reach for the middle/high schoolers and young families who were once its core domestic demographic, versus wealthier adults and inbound tourists who can absorb it.
What the thread doesn’t fully spell out for a non-Japanese reader: the “washed-up middle-aged people” jabs reference a real, well-documented demographic shift in Japanese Disney fandom toward adult repeat visitors and “Disney otaku” culture, a phenomenon distinct from the American image of Disney parks as primarily kid/family destinations. Also worth flagging: despite the griping, Tokyo Disney Resort’s attendance and per-guest spending have both been hitting record highs in recent years, which is precisely why Oriental Land Co. keeps raising prices—demand hasn’t softened.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “[Sad News] Tokyo Disneyland Abolishes FastPass wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww” (the string of “w”s is Japanese internet shorthand for laughter, like “lol”).
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