Japan In the Land of Mickey-San

By Pico Iyer/Tokyo

"It's as if we're taking the seeds offered from across the sea and cultivating them into our own Japanese garden," the long-beaked cartoon crane explains to the audio-animatronic figures of a little girl and her brother. "Culture doesn't just come; it develops slowly, richly. Generation after generation has to digest and refine these marvelous influences." The message may seem a little heavy for an amusement park, but the audience in the country's first revolving Carousel Theater is all ears. As the stage revolves, the sagacious bird launches into a lecture on the virtues of isolationism. Finally the Feathered One concludes, "People are like dreams," a huge red sun rises above the stage, and all the flesh-and-blood visitors to the Meet the World pavilion are ushered next door into a kind of epilogue to the show: a National Panasonic model of the ideal Japanese home of the future, featuring four members of a robot-simulated family, plus dog, attending to their own techno-gadgets. Tokyo Disneyland is not your average theme park.

Outside the pavilion's 21-TV lobby, a kimono-clad granny is being photographed in Goofy's welcoming embrace. White-collar workers in blue blazers and dark ties are shuffling around the lines for the world's only Cinderella Castle Mystery Tour. A girl in a warm-up jacket that reads IT IS ARGUED THAT DOUBLE SUICIDE IS THE SUBLIME CULMINATION OF LOVE placidly sips melon juice. Nothing disturbs the clean blue air except high tinkling cries of "Kawaii!" (Isn't it cute!) "Look," coos an extravagantly chic young mother to her three-year-old son, dapper in black leather pants, while his leather-jacketed father records the scene on videotape. "Look over there at Mickey-san!"

In a country where ritual is often the closest thing to religion, Mickey- san's Imperial Palace has in less than five years become something of a national pilgrimage site. In 1987 roughly 1 million schoolchildren, who would previously have been taken to Japan's great historical sites, were brought to the park. Last week, as people across the nation gathered at shrines to usher in an auspicious New Year, Tokyo Disneyland stayed open for 36 straight hours, serving as a kind of alternative temple. By day's end 200,000 votaries had observed the country's most important holiday at its favorite playland.

All this may seem a far cry from Walt Disney's original conception. But in a deeper sense, it may be its ultimate realization. For if the Disney parks of Florida and California offer squeaky-clean visions of a perfect society, the Disneyland that flourishes in Tokyo is even cleaner and more utopian. Yet even as the Japanese version reproduces virtually every feature of its American models, it turns them into something entirely Japanese. Melvin, Buff and Max, the antlered commentators at the Country Bear Jamboree, speak in the grave basso profundos of Kurosawa samurai. Alice in Wonderland has Oriental features. Frontierland has been turned into Westernland ("The Japanese don't like frontiers," explains a park official), and Main Street has become the World Bazaar.

The central icon of this singular faith is, inevitably, Mickey Mouse, whose unfailing perkiness and elder-statesmouse status (recently celebrated in a 17- ; day 59th birthday party) assure him success in a culture that has respect for old age and a soft spot for the cute. The little fellow's image is everywhere in Japan -- on Mitsubishi bankbooks, in framed photos within Zen temples, even on Emperor Hirohito's wristwatch. "Mickey Mouse is an actor," explains the slogan on the cover of a Mickey Mouse diary, "and as such he can do anything; he can play any role."

One role he definitely plays is to support another of Japan's driving principles: pleasure as big business. Foot-high dolls of his consort Minnie in kimono go for more than $60 in Tokyo Disneyland, and the number of ice creams sold there in a single year would, if piled up, reach 14 times as high as 12,388-ft. Mount Fuji.

In the end, though, what most distinguishes Tokyo Disneyland from its American forebears is its user-friendly audience. There are no screeching infants along its spotless walkways and no teenagers on the make. At closing time, after soft neon and colored lights have turned the place into a lovely fairyland, there is no frantic rush for the gates. Elegant secretaries and college boys in shirts bearing the vaguely anarchic slogan CIVIL RIGHT FREAK YOU KNOW UNIVERSITY EDUCATION stand in orderly lines until sweetly smiling cheerleaders lead the crowd forward in regimented squads.

So when the daily Parade of Dreams Come True culminates in a refrain of "Tokyo Disneyland is your land . . . ," the line makes sense in more ways than one. Here, after all, is a flawlessly clean, high-tech, perfectionist model of the flawlessly clean, high-tech, perfectionist society. Small wonder, perhaps, that a couple of years ago, when a group of Japanese were asked what had given them the most happiness in life, more than half mentioned not marriage or family, nor work or religion or love, but simply, and inevitably, Disneyland.