Japan has a strong tendency to recreate the look of foreign towns. It’s got to be because the country is surrounded by oceans on all sides, something that so completely isolated our ancestors from other continents that they couldn’t just satisfy their curiosity about what was out there by impulsively jumping in a boat and checking it out without making preparations for a massive sea voyage—they’d certainly have been forced to give up and come back without discovering anything.
Once Japan was more economically developed and people had nearly everything material they could want in their lives, they started seeking out experiences rather than things. This is probably what led to the era when amusement parks and theme parks started popping up all over the place.
Italy shares its borders with multiple countries, so you can visit several other European nations over land. That may be why Italians feel such a strong rivalry with their neighbors and seem to have no interest in building theme parks that recreate the look of foreign cities and towns. Plus, because each Italian province and town retains its own distinctive characteristics, it’s almost as if the municipalities themselves create a theme-park atmosphere. Venice and Alberobello are examples of cities that clearly demonstrate this effect.
One of the unexpected ways you experience the close proximity of other countries here is the fact that people give overseas trips as gifts. When a person enters or graduates university, for example, it’s common to buy them a trip abroad. Not only is it a perfect experience for a young adult, it’s also a great way to encourage them to get out and experience the world. And because you can go to a neighboring country in as little as weekend for a reasonable amount of money, it ends up being an affordable and easily-arranged gift for both the giver and the receiver.
Japan-themed events are a staple in Milan, and we recently had one with a Showa-era Tokyo theme. A Polish illustrator used watercolors to create intricate paintings of midcentury storefronts in the capital, which were then blown up to life size and set up along streets that were made to look like asphalt. The effect was one of actually walking through a vintage Tokyo shopping arcade. The event used a huge indoor space to recreate the Tokyo streets so that Italians and visitors from other countries could enjoy a bygone era in Japan that’s particularly fascinating to them. Many people reported having a great experience.
Italians haven’t been able to actually travel to Japan during the pandemic, but at least they were able to create a Japan-style theme park so that they could feel like they were there—with a Showa-era touch, no less!
