The story begins with a replica. During Expo 2005, organizers built a painstaking recreation of the Kusakabe family home from My Neighbor Totoro, tucking it into the Forest Experience Zone of the world's fair grounds. When the Expo closed, the house refused to be temporary. It reopened to the public in July 2006 and drew steady streams of visitors for over a decade, proving that people would travel to Aichi Prefecture not for roller coasters but for the chance to step inside a Miyazaki film. In 2017, Studio Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki made the announcement fans had been dreaming of: the park surrounding the Totoro house would become a full Ghibli theme park. Hayao Miyazaki himself joined the planning process. His son, Goro Miyazaki, was named the park's director and lead designer, shaping a vision where the experience would be about walking, exploring, and discovering -- never about thrill rides.

Ghibli Park is organized into five themed areas, each drawing from different corners of the studio's filmography. Ghibli's Grand Warehouse, housed in a converted heated swimming pool from the Expo era, is the largest indoor space -- a sprawling collection of walkthrough exhibitions, scene recreations designed for photo opportunities, and the Cinema Orion, which screens short films available nowhere else except Tokyo's Ghibli Museum. Here visitors find the "World Emporium" antique shop from Whisper of the Heart and the "Cat Bureau" from The Cat Returns, the latter recreated at cat scale. The Hill of Youth draws from the studio's coming-of-age stories. Dondoko Forest centers on the original Totoro house, now renovated and surrounded by a wooden playground on the hillside behind it. Mononoke Village brings Princess Mononoke to life with models of the film's mystical creatures and settings inspired by Irontown and Emishi Village. The Valley of Witches, which opened on March 16, 2024, is anchored by a life-size replica of Howl's Moving Castle -- the towering centerpiece of the area -- alongside a recreation of Kiki's family home and the bakery Gutiokipanja from Kiki's Delivery Service.

The absence of mechanical rides is deliberate and philosophical. Miyazaki's films have always valued stillness, observation, and the slow unfolding of wonder over spectacle. Ghibli Park translates that sensibility into physical space. Visitors walk forest paths between areas, encountering the same kind of quiet discoveries that Miyazaki's characters experience -- a hidden detail in a building's woodwork, a garden that echoes a scene from Spirited Away, sunlight filtering through trees that the Expo organizers fought to preserve twenty years ago. The Guardian described it as having "no fun rides but plenty of spirit." The park even includes a free-access playground based on The Cat Returns, positioned next to Mononoke Village, open to anyone without a ticket. It is a theme park built on the conviction that imagination, not adrenaline, is the real attraction.

Ghibli Park is a family project in the most literal sense. Hayao Miyazaki, who co-founded Studio Ghibli in 1985 and directed films from Nausicaa to The Boy and the Heron, participated in the park's conceptual planning. His son Goro, who directed Tales from Earthsea and From Up on Poppy Hill, serves as the park's overall designer, translating his father's two-dimensional worlds into three-dimensional architecture. Producer Toshio Suzuki, the business mind behind Studio Ghibli for decades, brokered the partnership with Aichi Prefecture and the Chunichi Shimbun newspaper that made the project financially viable. Construction began in 2020, and the park opened in phases -- three areas in November 2022, with Mononoke Village following in late 2023 and the Valley of Witches completing the original plan in March 2024.

Reaching Ghibli Park is itself a small adventure. From central Nagoya, visitors take the subway's Higashiyama Line east to Fujigaoka Station, then transfer to the Linimo -- a magnetic levitation train built for Expo 2005 that still glides silently through the eastern suburbs. The park's main entrance sits at Aichikyuhaku-kinen-koen Station, a stop whose unwieldy name translates simply to "Expo Commemorative Park Station." Stepping off the maglev and into the forested grounds, the city falls away. The trees that Expo organizers preserved two decades ago now shelter the worlds of Totoro and Mononoke, Kiki and Howl. It is a place where a world's fair ended and something more lasting began -- proof that the best theme parks are the ones that trust their visitors to find the magic on their own.