Tokyo Disneyland

This guide to Tokyo Disneyland opens on its rain-soaked debut, April 15, 1983, when Card Walker of Walt Disney Productions and Masatomo Takahashi, head of a little-known Japanese firm, cut a ribbon together under the glass roof of World Bazaar as Mickey and friends looked on. It traces the ground beneath the park itself, land dredged from Tokyo Bay that keeps quietly settling decades later, and the unusual partnership between two companies that built this place. Listen for how engineers keep the rides level on a shoreline that never stops shifting.