Almost all my experience with amusement parks have been with Great America back at home. I went to Busch Gardens once during a Jr. High School field trip to Washington D.C., but I don't really remember much of it. Everyone's always telling me about how their state always has the most exciting roller coasters and amusement parks, which we don't exactly have in Parmount's Great America in San Jose.


We already went to Disneyland, so I asked Haruka which amusement park in Japan had the best rides. She told me it was a place called Fuji-Q Highland near Mt. Fuji. We both had a day off sometime last month and we decided to go.


Before going to Fuji-Q, I did a little bit of my homework (thank you again Wikipedia) and found out that Fuji-Q once had the tallest roller coaster in the world (now the 8th tallest), called "Fujiyama." A roller coaster called "Dodonpa," which was the world's fastest roller coaster in 2001 (now the 3rd at 106.9 mph!), and another roller caster called "Eejanaika" which is the 2nd 4th dimensional roller coaster in the world (left and above picture).


From Tokyo we took a bus to Mt. Fuji, which was about two hours. The rides definitely were much better than anything at Great America Fujiyama was the longest roller coaster I have ever ridden, it seemed almost twice as long as anything I've ridden before. The food was as you would expect, a little expensive, and not very good. They had a lot more ethnic selections of food, we decided to start off the days with Gyros, and ended the night with dinner in the Thai food plaza before going on Fujiyama for the second time before the park closed.

I had a really good time, my only complaint being the length of the lines. Japan is so big on procedures and safety, that not only does it take me an hour just to wire money home from my bank, but the lines at Fuji-Q took twice as long as anything back home. Just looking at the line, you wouldn't think that it would take more than an hour to get on the ride, but that's not taking into consideration that the Japanese take twice as long to ensure that everyone is fastened securely into the ride. Hell, I'm always one for safety, but by the end of the night I was mumbling that I'd gladly trade having some kid fall off the ride every few years just to make the lines go faster.

O yea, one other big difference I noticed was that not only did they have signs that prohibited kids under the age of 10 from going on the rides, but they also had signs prohibiting people over 55! So I guess if you're old, or you got some kind of crazy disease that makes you look old, you're SOL.