Today we took all of the modes of transportation to get us from Osaka to Tokyo, with a long detour into Ghibli Park near Nagoya.

If you know a lot about Studio Ghibli, great! There a tons of pics below that will be familiar to you.

If you know nothing about Studio Ghibli, this post may be less interesting. Although it may inspire you to watch some of the movies!

Before this trip, I knew basically nothing about Studio Ghibli. I had been given the movie Spirited Away a few years ago, and I honestly just thought it was pretty weird.

Very few people who have seen Ghibli movies are neutral about them. Most people I’ve met really love them, or really don’t get them. I may be in the second camp, but my travel buddy Jordan is in the first camp. He had very few requests for this trip, and going to Ghibli park was one of them. Since I’m requesting not one but TWO days in Tokyo Disney, I thought it only fair we make this happen for him.

He also sent a list of recommended movies to watch in preparation for visiting Ghibli park, and I watched quite a few of them.

Studio Ghibli is one of if not the most famous anime studio in the world. They’ve been creating movies since at least the early 90’s, and have gained a lot of fame with their distinctive animation drawing style, as well as their deep imagery and themes.

I want to be clear; I don’t hate these movies. I see all of the work that has gone into them and understand why they are so beloved. I just don’t enjoy watching them very much. I think they intentionally move quite slow, which is a big departure for my Disney raised brain. Many people have tried to convince me that they are deep rather than boring, but in preparation for this trip I watched like 10 Ghibli movies, and felt the same way about all of them.

That being said, since we had decided to go to the park, I’m really glad I watched them. The park would have made no sense without seeing them.

Ghibli park is an area around Nagoya in Japan, where they have taken a public park and carved out sections that they have closed off and filled with recreations of the movie sets. You can see how fans of the movies would be enchanted by getting to spend time in these recreations. It really is like stepping into the movies.

It’s also a selfie factory. You will stand in tons of lines to take tons of pictures, and that is the bulk of what there is to do in the park. There is one children’s ride, and almost no snacks (which is at least 60% of what I go to theme parks for).

In general, this wasn’t my scene. But it was a beautiful sunny day, so I did enjoy walking around the park and loved seeing the excitement in the people who love these movies.

That’s the preamble, now here’s the day:

My day started at 5am. No joke. Getting from Osaka to Ghibli Park looks easy on a map, but it actually takes a metro, train, and bus. We had special tickets to enter a section of the park called The Grand Warehouse at 10am, but we also wanted to get there early because they sell a stuffed toy that is only available in the park and there are a set number of them. It is called the Heen plushie. Y’all, I’ve already said I didn’t love the movies, but their marketing worked so well on me and I decided I needed that plushie, which would mean we needed to get there early. By the end of our time in universal we decided that we would try to get there an hour early and hope for the best.

We planned to leave Osaka around 6:30am. We didn’t leave Osaka by 6:30, we left a little bit late, and then everything just kept happening a little bit later. We caught a later train, then a later bus, and by the time we got to the park it was 10 minutes before opening. Through all of that, we were dragging our luggage around and had to stuff it in lockers at the train station.

By that point we gave up on the Heen plushie and got in line for the warehouse. Here’s the entrance:

Oh and here’s the cute cup I got from the automated matcha dispenser at the train station. Love those things

We got in and immediately realized the lines for pictures had already started. There’s a famous recreation from Spirited Away of a character called no name sitting on a bus. You take your pic next it, but the line was already over an hour wait.

So we looked at other sets instead. We started with this one from Castle in the Sky (which I saw)

See! The recreations are actually really cool! They were all incredibly detailed and it was fun that you could interact with them.

We also wandered over to the milk bar, which I read had great cake and milk in glass bottles. That was by far the best thing we ate in the park, so if you love Ghibli and go don’t pass that up.

I know that’s a lot of pics of the milk station, but that cake really was a highlight for me.

We saw people lining up to go in the gift shop which hadn’t opened yet. I have no idea why we were all rope dropping the gift shop, but I had my cake and needed to stay in that area to eat it, so I got in line.

The gift shop opened and everyone rushed it. I got a cute tee and Jimmy found some bowls he liked, and people were literally running around grabbing things off the shelf like it was supermarket sweep. To this day, I don’t know why. I kept looking to see if everyone was grabbing a particular item, but nope. They were just grabbing anything.

We left the gift shop and saw some other set pieces

And made it into an area based off the movie The Secret Life of Arrietty. This movie was probably my favorite. I thought it was cute and really enjoyed the music. It’s based off the book The Borrowers, about tiny people who live in homes. The sets were all extra large sized to make you feel like one of the borrowers.

They even had a recreation of a scene where a human leaves a note for one of the borrowers

I was really glad we did that section earlier because a couple of hours later there were long lines to take pictures at all of those spots.

After visiting that set we wandered through an area that talked about the animation and history of Ghibli studios. It had a lot of original drawings and info about the movies. It also had some good info on animation, but most of the explanations were in Japanese only. It also had some set recreations, but pictures were only allowed in a couple of those places.

We then went and watched a short film that you can only see at Ghibli Park or Ghibli Museum in Tokyo. It was cute. It was in Japanese with no subtitles, but I felt like I could still understand most of it just from the visuals. I’m also kind of used to the idea that I won’t understand everything in Ghibli movies.

Lunch was up next, and I decided to try the famous spaghetti sandwich. It was exactly what it sounds like: spaghetti shoved into two pieces of bread. It was fine, but the spaghetti was pretty bland.

The weather was gorgeous, though, so sitting outside in the sun was really nice.

After lunch we checked in on the no name line (now multiple hours long), so we wandered into the last section of the warehouse with recreations of movie scenes you can take pics with.

I really can’t under emphasize that the main activity here is taking pictures. Here they are:

I have never seen this movie, but I thought the little creatures war planning was interesting.

Most people were meticulously trying to recreate the scenes with their poses, but I didn’t remember most of the scenes so I just did what I I wanted. And people probably thought I was ridiculous.

Once we’d gotten our fill of the Grand Warehouse, we decided to visit some of the other sections.

Next up for us was a section called Valley of the Witches. You walk through the public park to get there, and I noted a truck selling strawberries. I’ll definitely end up back there.

Here’s the entrance to Valley of the Witches:

In this area the main attractions are recreations from the movies Howl’s Moving Castle and Kiki’s delivery service.

For those who don’t know, the giant building in the background is Howl’s castle. It moves. That’s about it.

With our special ticket we got to go in. The rooms were meticulously recreated and were genuinely very cool, but it was also a very tight and crowded area. The inside of all of the recreations were small spaces with lots of people. No pics allowed inside.

We also got to visit the house that Kiki delivers to, and there’s a great picture op where you can pretend to fly a broom. That line was incredibly long so we skipped it. The line to get into Kiki’s bakery was also really long, so no baked goods for us.

Jordan and I decided to head to the gift shop in this section, while Jimmy went to visit a section set around the movie Princess Mononoke.

The gift shop in Valley of the Witches had different things than the grand warehouse, so if you’re a super fan you probably want to visit both. The line was long but very fast moving.

In Mononoke village Jimmy got to make fried mochi. He said that the person helping him didn’t speak English and the written English instructions were very unclear, so he had a journey to get there but was successful in the end.

Jordan and I found him on a bench outside of the hut knawing away on his mochi. The village itself was very small, pretty desolate looking, and very out of the way. If fried mochi is important to you, then head on out. Otherwise I thought it was pretty shippable.

Time was starting to run out before we needed to catch a train to Tokyo, and because we’re gluttons for punishment we decided to head out to an area of the park called Dondoko forest. This is the part that is furthest away from where we were. We could have paid to take the cat bus (if you’ve watched My Neighbor Totoro you know what that is, if you haven’t don’t worry about it) but instead we decided to be cheap and walk.

To be fair, the park is beautiful and it was a nice, peaceful little hike. I think most people take the bus so we were the only ones on the trail which was a nice brake from the crowded spaces.

We ended up in this beautiful Japanese garden… because we took a wrong turn. Minimal backtracking led us to a recreation of the house from the movie.

This was another tiny space full of people, but in this one you had to take off your shoes. Pics not allowed inside, but here’s a pic from the outside.

These recreations have so much detail to them, and really do look just like the movies. This is the fathers study

As an added bonus you can follow the acorn trail up a giant hill.

Where you find a giant Totoro. You can actually climb up inside him, but we left that for the kids.

At the top we realized there is a funicular that goes up and down the giant hill. So we took it down.

Then we started our walk back to entrance of the park to catch the bus back to the train station.

Luckily the park has a little trolley that took pity on us, picked us up, and drove us back. So thankful for that trolley.

At the entrance to the park was a cute little outdoor cafe, which had some wonderful soft serve

After that I stopped taking pictures because I just got so tired. We took the bus back to the train station, picked up our bags, grabbed a bento box to go, and trained the few hours back to Tokyo.

By the time we checked into our airbnb, I was so too tired to move. Jimmy and I went across the street to 7/11 to grab a smoothie and onigiri, and Jordan decided to have a solo adventure to find dinner. As the trip went on it became clear that as Jordan adjusted to the time change, he is a night person. So as soon as I was ready for bed, he was ready for fun.

I crawled into my rock hard Japanese bed to try for some sleep, but Jordan had an adventure at a local Izakaya. He’s got a pretty good story, so if you know him you should ask him about it.

For me, it’s goodnight.