It’s the most miserable day on earth, six degrees and pouring rain, and I am standing umbrella-less in an hours-long queue to get into Tokyo Disney.
I had this ticket booked before I had a plane ticket home. This was the top of my itinerary, the one thing I needed to do before anything else. I needed to see the castle, exactly the same as the one in Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom in Orlando, Florida, where I had worked for a year.
Images of red vests and navy bow ties swam before my eyes, the blazing summer sun, the grins of my coworkers as they waved to the crowds, and I was so sure I was going to cry walking down my precious Main Street, seeing Cinderella Castle, hearing the music, the smells, everything.
At last, after nearly five years, I was home.
But I felt nothing.
Don’t get me wrong, I had a great day. I love rollercoasters; I love parades. But it wasn’t the emotional reunion that I had been anticipating, primed by viral videos of people falling to their knees seeing the castle again and emotional posts from former coworkers when they triumphantly returned to their old workplace. It felt like I had let someone down. And I spiralled a little, a Rabbit Hole opening up in my mind.
The truth was there all along of course, in the brief silence before I would answer “What was it like?” or, “Would you do it again?” or, “Are you going to go back?” Because of course the real answer was fuck no, but it feels more complicated than that.
Peeling back the years of denial, the simple truth is I… I was… I was a Disney Adult.
Please don’t get me wrong: there are much worse things a person can be than just a bit too excited about a new popcorn bucket from Disney World. Disney Adults, characterised as merch-obsessed, overly-attached to the dull blank stare of a Mickey costume, full devotees to the House of Mouse, are ultimately harmless. I don’t want to paint anyone as foolish or stupid; it’s very easy to laugh at those who find themselves in a cult until you yourself are suddenly falling for it. But the culture around Disney in America is so deeply fascinating, so ingrained in its national fabric at this point that it’s like a religion.
What do Disney parks represent to American society but the promised land? Huge extended family groups converge in Florida, all in matching shirts, a trip years in the making. One day we’ll all go to Disney together and we’ll have FUN as a FAMILY so help me god.
Statues of the Holy Trinity greet you at the gates: Walt Disney the Father (the creator, an omnipotent god who is with us always, all-seeing all-knowing amen), his brother Roy is the Son (ignore the brother thing for the purpose of the metaphor – he’s the man on the ground doing the dirty work) and Mickey the Holy Spirit (fucking everywhere). Walt, and then by extension the parks he created, are deified as the ultimate embodiment of the American Dream: a simpler time where anyone can pull themselves up by the bootstraps. You too can succeed with just a bit of elbow grease and pixie dust – everything you can ever dream of is waiting for you!
And I, American or not, had to buy into the fantasy, because otherwise the reality is I was getting paid $10 an hour and working 60 hours a week, and that just kinda sucks. But I was getting paid $10 an hour at Disney. I had made it. You’re told from the start what a privilege it is to work there, to treat the position with pride. Taking the, “At this job, we’re not a team, we’re a family!” to the next level, sometimes I wouldn’t know anything about a coworker before being thrown into the trenches with them. But working in crowd control at the Most Magical Place on Earth, you had to have utter trust in them. That’s the real magic, trauma bonding.
I tell stories of the good times, the interesting and funny times, the time I saw Neil Patrick Harris. I don’t tell the stories of my friends crying backstage because of how mercilessly cruel strangers can be. But the pride of working for the Walt Disney Corporation is what keeps people there, the belief that what they do matters, that they’re making magic for families, in the great long line of cast members who came before, all the way back to Walt.
Recently, the latest batch of Disney College Program graduates had their end-of-program celebration event, posing with cardboard photo frames that proudly proclaim, “I’ll always be a magic maker”. And you absolutely will, my child, you will go home and fulfil the purpose of that J-1 cultural exchange visa you’re on: to spread “cultural knowledge” of Disney and the good ol’ US of A, and encourage all your friends and family to come on back now!
In the meantime, hiring staff through the J-1 visa means Disney is not required to pay certain taxes for those employees, saving the company an estimated $15 million in wages each year.
It’s 2018, and I am walking across the cast member carpark. I undo the top button of my themed space-cadet uniform, release the space buns meticulously piled upon my head, and wave goodbye to coworkers as they scatter and disperse between the cars. Fireworks go off in the distance. I open my phone to the news of a Disneyland California cast member, Yeweinisht Mesfin, who died in the car that she lived in, unable to afford rent or food.
In 2023, Disney parks are estimated to have generated $32.6 billion in revenue. When Mesfin died, Bob Iger, head of the Walt Disney Company, was receiving an estimated $27 million dollars a year. She was making $12,000 annually. The American Dream, the fantasy that Main Street USA embodies – unavailable for the staff who turn the cogs in the dream factory.
Worlds away, it’s still raining in Tokyo and I’m making a peace sign in front of the castle. Without the same tangled cultural history of Disney and America, Tokyo Disneyland obviously doesn’t quite pull off the American Good Ol’ Days of Yesteryear thing, the true embodiment of the American Dream. It’s almost like a satellite tourist installation, the States simplified and romanticised in the same way that Australia is beaches and the outback and Aotearoa/New Zealand is sheep and Lord of the Rings. Nearly everything here is cut-and-paste from the American parks: the same rides, the same locations, the same music.
The things I was so excited to re-experience after so long are clunky, old and, without the mythos of “Walt Disney made this” behind them, deeply uninteresting. Without the actual American Dream Factory pumping away in the utilidors, the spell is broken, the clock strikes 12, and Disney is revealed to be… a theme park. Just a theme park, at the end of the day.
It sounds ridiculous for that to be the big reveal here. Water is wet, Disney World’s a theme park. But I was so easily caught up in the reverence of the place, the genuine joy people felt to be at Disney, the way people went, “Oh wow!” when I said I worked there, the friends I miss so desperately. I finished uni and ran away to have an adventure, and I did, and it wasn’t the park itself that made it special. And now the experience is so utterly and purely crystalised, frozen in time, that it cannot be replicated.
It simply doesn’t exist anymore, my Main Street. There is no teary moment, no collapse to the ground in the emotional of it all, because the moment is long gone. That is of course the Real Magic™️ – that there is truly nothing special about any of these rides or mascots or anything, but you can believe so truly that there is.
At Magic Kingdom, there’s a ride called The Carousel of Progress. “Ride” is a generous term, as you slooowly rotate around a central stationary stage, where animatronics narrate the great inventions of the 20th century. This is not the stuff you pay hundreds of dollars for, but for the devoted, it is heralded as sacred: the last thing Walt “laid hands on” before passing away, ironically condemning it to stasis. It sits mostly forgotten in a corner of Tomorrowland, providing nothing more than an airconditioned room to have a sit in for a while. But if anyone ever tried to get rid of the Carousel there’d be an uprising.
That is the curse of the Disney Adult that has been broken for me: I had deified my own memories in my mind, and by holding them so sacredly, I was unable to move on. Tokyo Disney was like the training wheels coming off, a perfect replica, a practice for the real show. And what if I had had this realisation that Disney ain’t shit when I finally, triumphantly, returned to Orlando after so long, and what if it destroyed me, Willy Loman style?
I didn’t, in the end, get a photo with Mickey. This was another Moment™️ – like seeing the castle – that I had been eagerly anticipating, explaining to the Cast Members the significance of it all in my fractured Japanese. But I didn’t. I felt like I should, but I simply didn’t want to.
Instead, I turned and I left. And I was content. I will grant myself the kindness of knowing that I worked at Disney is not the most interesting part of me. My best days are not yet behind me, but ahead. I walked out of the park, into a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow… yes, that’s a reference.
Photos provided by the author