Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Colonialist Histories in Tokyo's DisneySea Theme Park

2022; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 47; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/chq.2022.0001

1553-1201

Michelle J. Smith,

Asian Culture and Media Studies

Colonialist Histories in Tokyo's DisneySea Theme Park Michelle J. Smith (bio) The Disney theme parks are typically imagined as all-American, with California's Disneyland and Florida's Walt Disney World parks serving as fantasy destinations for both American children and young people internationally. However, there are now more Disney park locations situated outside the United States, primarily in Asia, with two parks in Tokyo, Disneyland Hong Kong, Disneyland Shanghai (the most recent addition in 2016), and Disneyland Paris. Another comparatively recent development in Disney parks is the transformation of iconic and long-standing rides and attractions in light of greater cross-cultural awareness, as part of Disney's "Stories Matter" initiative that has seen films such as Dumbo (1941), Peter Pan (1953), and Swiss Family Robinson (1960) labelled with content advisories on the streaming service Disney+ ("Stories Matter"). As of early 2022, Splash Mountain at Walt Disney World has been refurbished to replace Song of the South characters with The Princess and the Frog theming, while a new story and culturally diverse team of explorers have updated the Jungle Cruise in both American parks (Corless). Disneyland Paris has also removed scenes of Tiger Lily and the Native American tribe from an informational video about Peter Pan's Flight, prompting speculation that the ride itself (which features in five Disney parks) may also be updated as part of the Stories Matter initiative ("Disneyland Paris"). Contemporary concerns about the racist and culturally insensitive content of early Disney films are now also being directed toward the theme park rides based upon those films and some iconic original Disneyland attractions, such as the Jungle Cruise, which, until very recently, featured racist caricatures of Indigenous people (Martens).1 In this context, in which Disney's cinematic and theme park legacy is subject to critique and potential transformation, it is important for children's literature and media scholars to be cognizant of the narratives present in the Disney parks [End Page 3] on a global scale. In 2001, Tokyo DisneySea became the first unique Disney park to be built outside the United States, complementing the existing Tokyo Disneyland, which opened in 1983 as an exact replica of the original Disneyland in Anaheim, California. DisneySea is a significant site for analysis because it does not reproduce rides found in the American Disney parks—as is the case in other international Disney parks—but is an original creation. In this article, I seek to examine how ideologies relating to international exploration, discovery, and colonization that are now seen as problematic in Disneyland and Walt Disney World attractions underwrite much of the DisneySea park. While the Stories Matter film advisories locate problematic stereotypes of people and cultures in Disney's past—"[t]hese stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now" ("Stories Matter")—in this article I undertake one of the first focused analyses of DisneySea, demonstrating that even a Disney park constructed in the twenty-first century rests on colonialist mythologies and valorization of Western notions of "discovery," exploration, and progress toward civilization. As Clare Bradford observes, children's texts "disclose conceptions of and attitudes to race, ethnicity, colonialism and postcolonialism, responding to the discourses and practices of the societies where they are produced" (39). The end of colonial regimes, she points out, does not mean that "children's texts are necessarily free of the ideological freight of those earlier times" (Bradford 39). Nevertheless, as Louis Marin points out, the way in which the Disney parks forge a harmonious, scientifically developed, plentiful self-contained world conceals the "violence and exploitation" integral to the obtainment of these utopian characteristics (240). In this essay I argue that colonialist ideas of the past, including the privileging of Western culture, remain central within DisneySea, which reproduces the same troubling ideologies that have motivated revisions to attractions in Disney's American parks. In the following section I engage with existing research on the American Disney parks and their relationship to fantasized histories. I use this critical foundation as a basis from which to contrast the historical narrative of American Disney parks with my reading of DisneySea as an expanded vision of an idealized Western (American and European) past.2 Reading the...