Huis ten Bosch (“House in the Woods”) is the name of one of the four official residences of the Dutch Royal Family, located in The Hague in the Netherlands.
It’s also the name of a theme park in Japan, on Hario Island in the southern part of Sasebo, facing Omura Bay — in the Nagasaki Prefecture, not far from Hirado, where the Dutch opened a trading post in 1609.
The park opened in 1992, reached a peak attendance of 4.25 million visitors in 1996, and declared bandkruptcy in 2003, with debt of 220 billion yen.
The $3 billion theme park qualifies as a monumental mistake:
Sprawling as it does over 152 hectares (375 acres) of Omura Bay shoreline in the western Nagasaki Prefecture city of Sasebo, the park is more than three times the size of Tokyo Disneyland and still bigger than Tokyo Disneyland and DisneySea combined, awing the resident-visitor of these cramped lands with its sheer scale. Add in the 250 holiday homes in the 50-hectare Wassenaar zone, named after a chic suburb of The Hague, and the entire development is roughly the size of the Principality of Monaco.
Naturally I now want to visit.
