Tokyo Disneyland With Kids

Tokyo Disneyland is consistently voted the best Disney park in the world, and after a day there we would not argue. It is more compact than the American parks, but the immersion is deeper, every detail is more precisely kept, and the staff are more committed. Walking through the gates feels less like entering a large theme park and more like stepping into a different dimension. If your family is doing Tokyo, this is the day the kids will talk about for the rest of the trip.

The best Disney park in the world

There are two parks at the Tokyo Disney Resort: Tokyo Disneyland, the classic castle park this guide is about, and Tokyo DisneySea next door, a nautical-themed park that exists nowhere else in the world. You cannot do both properly in one day, so most families with younger kids pick Disneyland first. What sets it apart is the finish. The paint is fresher, the queues are calmer, the shows run like clockwork, and the whole place is held to a standard the other Disney parks only approximate.

The rides worth queuing for

The classics hold up brilliantly here. Big Thunder Mountain, the Haunted Mansion and Space Mountain are the headline thrill rides, and they are the ones to hit first or to book through the app. Splash Mountain, over in Critter Country, is the one that actually gets you wet, which on a hot Tokyo day is the reason to ride it rather than the reason to skip it. Beyond those, the park is full of gentler rides that the younger kids loved just as much, from the boats of It's a Small World to the spin of the Mad Hatter's tea cups.

Toontown, and the younger kids

If you have younger children, Toontown is the heart of the day. It is arguably the most kid-friendly area in any Disney park: the buildings are cartoonish and climbable, the characters appear often, and the pace is gentler than the main thoroughfares. Ours would happily have spent half the day here, and on a busy afternoon it is a good place to slow down while the older crowds queue for the mountains.

Cinderella's Castle and the evening show

Do not leave at dinnertime. The evening light show on Cinderella Castle is the single best visual moment in the park, and it is something we did not expect to find as moving as we did. The castle sits at the centre of everything, with the famous Partners statue of Walt Disney and Mickey in front of it, and as the light drops the whole place shifts into a different mood. Stake out a spot early, because the good viewing lines fill up well before the show starts.

A family plan that works

Disneyland rewards a plan almost as much as USJ does. The park is busiest from late morning to mid-afternoon, so the two levers that matter most are arriving at opening and using the app well. Get to the gate before it opens, walk straight to the headline rides or Toontown before the queues build, then use the quieter indoor rides to ride out the hot, crowded middle of the day.

• Buy dated tickets online in advance. The park sells out on weekends and school holidays, and same-day tickets are the worst-case scenario.
• Be at the gate for opening. We arrived for the 9am opening and there were already plenty of people there, but getting through the gates did not take long and the first hour is the calmest the park gets all day.
• Learn the app before you go. Queue-skipping at Tokyo Disneyland runs entirely through the official Tokyo Disney Resort app. The one to know now is Disney Premier Access, a paid reservation that gets you a return time and skips the standby line, at roughly ¥1,500 to ¥2,500 per person per attraction depending on the ride. Prices and the list of participating attractions change, so check in the app on the day rather than budgeting from a blog.
• Ride the mountains early, but do not assume. Big Thunder Mountain and Space Mountain build the longest standby queues. We went straight to Big Thunder Mountain at opening on the theory it would only get worse, and still waited 80 minutes, the longest queue of our entire day. We walked onto the same ride in under five minutes that afternoon. Opening is not automatically the quiet window, so read the posted wait times in the app before you commit to a line.
• Check the minimum heights. The thrill rides have a minimum height, so if you have little ones, check before you commit to a long queue and plan the gentler rides around them.
• Stay for the evening. The parade and the castle show genuinely transform the day, and the crowds thin on the rides while everyone gathers for it. People start bagging spots along the parade route a long time before it begins, so if you want a good line of sight, commit early. If you would rather ride, that is the window to do it.

Tickets, getting there and when to go

The resort is easy to reach without staying on-site. From Tokyo Station it is about 15 minutes on the JR Keiyo line to Maihama, and your IC card covers the trip, so a day trip from a base in central Tokyo works fine. For when to go, a weekday outside the Japanese school holidays beats a weekend by a wide margin, and the park is busiest over New Year, Golden Week in early May, and the summer holidays.

We have folded the trains and IC cards into our getting around guide, and what the theme-park days did to the trip total into the family budget guide. Disneyland is one part of our wider Tokyo family guide if you are planning the rest of the city around it, and if Osaka is on your route too, the Universal Studios Japan guide is the companion to this one. If you only have room for one park day, we did both on the same trip and wrote up the honest comparison of USJ and Disneyland.