Tobu World Square
Interesting facts
- The park still shows the original twin towers of New York's World Trade Center, destroyed in 2001, in a model almost 20 metres tall.
- Tokyo's former Imperial Hotel, the 1923 building demolished in 1968, survives here in miniature, so visitors can see a landmark that no longer exists.
- One miniature scene at the Forbidden City shows a film crew shooting The Last Emperor, and New York even has a staged street robbery.
- The collection keeps growing: Taipei 101 joined in 2015, Taiwan's Fuguijiao Lighthouse in 2018 and Bangkok's Wat Arun in 2019.
- A model of Tokyo Station has running Shinkansen and Chūō Line trains, part of a network of moving miniature railways across the park.
- A seasonal display in the Japan zone shows rural life through the year, from rice planting and Bon Odori dancing to the New Year firemen's parade.
- During the winter illuminations a 150-metre tunnel of lights leads visitors to the Alpine Roses Park section of the grounds.
- Egypt's Giza pyramids, the Great Sphinx and Abu Simbel all appear at 1:25, letting visitors compare ancient monuments with modern skyscrapers at the same scale.
Why it is worth it
Tobu World Square is a miniature park in the Kinugawa Onsen hot-spring district of Nikkō, and it takes its craft unusually seriously. Opened in 1993 by the Tobu railway group, it reproduces 102 buildings from 21 countries at a uniform scale of 1:25, set among landscaped gardens and populated by around 140,000 tiny figures. Many of the models depict UNESCO World Heritage sites, and because everything shares one scale, the relative size of the world's great buildings becomes suddenly legible in a way no photograph manages.
The park is arranged as a walk through zones: Modern Japan, America, Egypt, Europe, Asia and Japan. The Japan zone is the largest, with 34 exhibits, and Europe follows with 32, so that landmarks separated by thousands of kilometres stand a few steps apart. The Modern Japan zone is anchored by a model of Tokyo Skytree, unveiled in April 2010 while the real tower was still under construction; even at 1:25 it stands about 26 metres high and dwarfs everything around it. Elsewhere the Statue of Liberty, the Taj Mahal, the Forbidden City, the Great Wall and the Eiffel Tower are all within a short stroll of one another.
The joy of the place lies in the detail. The miniature people are posed in scenes of daily life: crowds, processions, tourists and workers, so that each model reads as a moment rather than an architectural drawing. Model trains, including a version of the Tobu limited express Spacia, run through the grounds. In the winter season the park is lit after dark with well over a million small lights, including a long tunnel of illuminations, and the models take on an entirely different character under the glow.
Getting there
The park is in Kinugawa Onsen, a hot-spring resort in the city of Nikkō, Tochigi Prefecture, about 10 km from the Imaichi district of Nikkō. Tobu World Square Station on the Tobu Kinugawa Line, opened in 2017, sits beside the entrance, one stop from Kinugawa Onsen Station; The Kinugawa Onsen area is served by Tobu Railway trains from Tokyo. The nearest airport by distance is Fukushima Airport (FKS), about 79 km away, but most visitors arrive by train from Tokyo.
Plan your visit
We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.
Nearby places
- Cedar Avenue of Nikkō 9.6 km · remarkable-tree
- Shrines and Temples of Nikkō 11.3 km · temple
- Nikkō Tōshō-gū 11.5 km · shinto-shrine
- Kegon Falls 20.3 km · waterfall
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Tobu World Square (東武ワールドスクウェア) is a theme park in Kinugawa Onsen, Nikkō, Tochigi, Japan. The theme park contains over a hundred 1:25 scale models of famous buildings, including UNESCO-designated World Cultural and Heritage Sites, complete with 140,000 1:25 miniature people.
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