USJ: Jaws

We popped out of Back to the Future at about 3:30 and continued wandering through the park. The next ride we came to was Jaws. I never actually liked the ride--the loud noises and heat from the flames didn't strike me as fun--and it couldn't have been warmer than 18 degrees, so I wasn't looking forward to getting wet. We were there, though, and Ju and Lee wanted to do it, so I didn't mind going with the flow.

The life-sized shark display at the entrance had a line of about fifty people waiting to take pictures with it. The wait time for the actual ride was another 100 minutes. We kept ourselves amused standing in line, admiring the decoration and wondering just how much of the detail is lost on the average Japanese tourist. My favorite decoration was likely a paid advertisement for All Nippon Airways.

The ride itself was more or less the same as I remembered: you're on a boat for a tour of Amity Island, and you discover Jaws doing his thing. The novelty of the ride is the tour guide, who goes from a script and does his or her best to interact with the automatronics. Maybe I just never appreciated it when I rode back in Orlando, but our guy was freaking awesome. He was jumping all over the boat, freaking out about the shark, all in adorably polite Japanese.