Harry Potter closes historic Japan amusement park
Visitors watch fireworks amid the coronavirus outbreak at Toshimaen amusement park in Tokyo, Japan on August 21, 2020. The park closed on Monday 94 years after it first opened with part of the site be turned into a new Harry Potter theme park in 2023.
A popular Tokyo amusement park on Monday closed for the last time after more than nine decades, with part of the site set to make way for a “Harry Potter” theme park.
Toshimaen amusement park, which opened in 1926 in northern Tokyo, caught the imagination of locals such as Junko and Hikari Abe, a mother and daughter who work at the park and met their partners there.
Junko, a 62-year-old park keeper who has worked intermittently at Toshimaen since the 1970s, said she had assumed it would be there until the end of her life.
“I wanted to enjoy that place together with my daughter.”
Daughter Hikari, 30, started working at the park in 2015. She had hoped to take family photos there after marrying her fiancee, who she also met there.
“It was a spot I had taken for granted because it had been there from the time I was born, so I can’t believe that it will be gone,” she said.
The new “Harry Potter” theme park is expected to open in 2023, and will be Japan’s first.
