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Somewhere Down in Japan

Relocated to Miami Beach

Yes, I moved to Miami Beach. However, it is not the real Miami Beach in Florida, but a fake one in Japan.

Let me explain. My family and I recently moved to Urayasu City in the prefecture of Chiba, which is very well known for being home to the Tokyo Disney Resort. The area where we live now is only 15 minutes walk from the resort. The train station I use for commuting is the one nearest the Disney. Every evening, when I get off the train exhausted after work, I bump into a crowd of people who wear black ears on their heads. The name of the station is "Maihama," which was named after Miami Beach. "Mai" is for Miami (maiami in katakana) and "hama" means "beach" in Japanese.

The area of Miahama was created on land reclaimed according to the plan of building the Disney theme parks. Oriental Land Company (OLC), which owns and operates Tokyo Disney Resort as a licensee of the Walt Disney Company, suggested the name of the area because Walt Disney World was in Florida, and the easiest association with Florida was Miami Beach. For the name of the station, however, OLC originally wanted to use "Tokyo Disneyland Station" instead of "Maihama." The Japan Railway Company approved it, but the Walt Disney Company did not. They were afraid that the name Disney would get a bad reputation if something negative but irrelevant to Disney occurred in or around the station.

If you want to have the name Maihama in your address, you have to live in an upscale residential area. I think this is partly because of the power of the Disney brand. However, you still can live near Maihama station and have good access to Disney at a quite reasonable cost if you do not mind what your street address looks like. That was what I did because I did not want to pay that much for my living place. I actually did not especially want to live near Disney either, but it ended up like that while I was trying to fulfill tons of requests from my wife. "I want a modestly roomy place located in a city very convenient to Tokyo, but not too urbanized. There should be no tall buildings around but lots of nice trees. Our baby should be able to have fun just walking round the neighborhood..."

I'm sure our baby has fun being able to watch the fireworks at Disney from our balcony every evening. Also, I bought my wife an annual passport to Disneyland for her birthday. She can take him there any time now... I hope he won't get too used to the dreamland and become insensitive to ordinary delights. I also hope I can keep enduring seeing people playing during weekdays while I go to work every morning.

posted by st.yuki
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