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Tokyo Disneyland eyes new facility in Asia: chairman
2008-04-15
The operator of Tokyo Disneyland said Tuesday it was considering opening a new facility in Southeast Asia as fans flocked to the theme park on its 25th anniversary. Oriental Land Co. chairman Toshio Kagami said the company wanted to operate a new leisure facility other than a theme park in Japan. "Maybe we will start with Southeast Asia," he told reporters here as Mickey and friends marked a quarter century in Japan. Some 15,000 fans queued up before the gate opened on the anniversary, according to the operator, which runs the park under a licence from Disney Enterprises, Inc. Many visitors, including children clad in Disney-character costumes, dashed towards their favourite attractions. Tokyo Disneyland opened in the suburbs of the Japanese capital on April 15, 1983 as the first Disney theme park outside the United States. Built on reclaimed land in Tokyo Bay dubbed "Maihama" -- a Japanese take on Florida's Miami Beach -- the resort has sprawled out to include hotels, a shopping mall, an aqua park and soon a permanent Cirque du Soleil. An Oriental Land spokesman said no firms plans had been drawn up for another facility. Hong Kong hosts a Disneyland, but government figures released in December showed that visitor numbers at the park fell by about 23 percent in its second year. The number of visitors to Tokyo Disneyland and DisneySea, the water park that opened in 2001, has stood at about 25 million in recent years, up from 9.9 million people in Disneyland's first year. Since 1983, a total of 436 million people have visited the two parks that sit next to the megalopolis. But with Japan's population ageing and shrinking, analysts say the theme park's future does not look entirely rosy. In an effort to woo senior citizens, it launched a cut-rate annual pass for visitors aged 60 or older in March. The Oriental Land group's revenue from theme parks was 289.1 billion yen (2.86 billion dollars) in the year to March 2007 -- a far cry from the performances of other overseas Disneylands.
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