My family and I visited Tokyo Disney Resort (Tokyo Disneyland and Disney Sea) and Universal Studios Japan (Osaka) in December 2024. We travelled as a family of four, with children aged 6 and 3. Here are some answers to the questions I have been asked about our trip, as well as some tips and tricks we learned during our research and time in the parks.
Tokyo Disney Resort
Tokyo Disney Resort consists of two parks – Tokyo Disneyland and Tokyo Disney Sea. You’ll need entry tickets to both parks and at a minimum, one day in each park.
You can choose to stay onsite at a Disney hotel, which gives you some additional benefits such as Happy Entry (15min early entry access to the parks). Alternatively, Tokyo Disney is easily accessible via train, with its own Tokyo Disney monorail connecting the closest train station with the two parks.
Tokyo DisneySea is a whole other park within the Tokyo Disney Resort area and is exclusive to Japan, based around a giant lake and a volcano. It’s extremely well done and probably our favourite of the two parks. Fantasy Springs is located here, the newest addition to Tokyo Disney Resort, and probably the area with the longest queues. Do your research on how to best tackle this area!
When visiting Tokyo Disney Resort, you need to be there approximately 1 hour before opening time if you have chosen not to purchase ride passes in advance. This is because at Tokyo Disney Resort you can use the app to get free standby passes, and purchase fast passes – but only once you’re INSIDE the park gates. These are all usually sold out within 30 minutes of opening time. We arrived 30 minutes before opening to Disney Sea, and it took until 40 minutes after opening for us to get inside. By this time most of the free passes were gone! Thankfully it didn’t affect us too much as we didn’t need the big and fast rides with small children, but if you were relying on these passes you would be disappointed. Alternatively, if you have the budget, you can prepurchase set rides from the Disney website or on Klook and then you don’t have to worry about your arrival time. When you enter, walk straight to your first preference popular ride of choice and (if you can while walking) while in the line start booking in your other rides and securing whichever additional passes you need.
A great thing about Tokyo Disney Resort is being able to order your food through the app. You can see the menu, pick your food and choose a pick up time. This is the best option, as lines to purchase can be lengthy. Keep in mind however, that during the parades they shut down the roads around the centre and it can be impossible to cross between zones until the parade has finished. We got caught out with a food order in World Bazaar, but we were stuck in Tomorrowland and couldn’t get through! Luckily they held our food for us.
Be prepared to queue for everything, from popcorn refills, to churros, to toilets, to merchandise! If you’re thinking of getting something and you see it with no line, get it straight away. I queued 20 minutes for popcorn, only because the kids were on a ride with my husband so I didn’t mind, but there was no way the kids would queue that long for food.
As obvious as it seems, it still needs to be said – all the rides are spoken in Japanese! Visiting Elsa in the Frozen Ride? Yep, it’s all in Japanese. Finding Nemo ride? Japanese! We got a good laugh out of it, but just go in expecting to never understand what is being said.
Read on past the photos for Universal Studios
Universal Studios Japan (Osaka)
You can choose to stay onsite at Universal Studios in one of the many hotels available, or you can visit for the day. USJ is easily accessible by train, just 15 minutes from downtown Osaka.
There is only one park to visit at USJ, and it is divided up into 9 different zones.
USJ operates a lot like its American counterpart (much more than Disney does), and we found it to be much easier to navigate the apps and the ‘rules’ of the park visit aligned closely with that of the American version.
The official park opening time on the day we visited was 8.30am. We lined up at 7am, and they actually opened the gates at 7.30am! This is an unwritten rule, but well known, that they regularly open up to 1 hour before the posted opening times. We anticipated a 7.30am opening time and were glad we got there 1.5hrs before the posted opening.
There is a McDonalds on the Universal Walk directly opposite the USJ entry gates, so most people purchased breakfast and ate it in line, which was great for the kids especially.
Once the park opened, we headed straight for Super Nintendo World and were able to walk straight in without an entry pass. At the time we visited, entry passes to SNW usually were required from 9am onwards. While we were in there in the morning, we actually grabbed an online entry pass to come back later that afternoon, which is a great idea if you can get one. We visited only 1 week after the new Donkey Kong ride had opened, so it was very busy, but we were able to get straight on to Yoshi’s train ride or the Mario Kart ride.
Once 9am ticked over and SNW was getting pretty busy, we took off and went to the Harry Potter world. Being an older area of the park, it was still quiet here and we were basically able to walk straight on to the rides still. Make the most of Child Swap if you have little ones who can’t ride!
Universal Wonderland has a great indoor play area for the kids, with a huge ball pit, huge climbing nets, giant bouncing balloons and all sorts of fun. This is a great spot to take a break, sit down and reset. We spent almost an hour here playing the kids loved it so much.
