Day 27, in which we travel thirty years into the future, to 2015

Today we took the train down to the docks on the eastern side of Osaka to visit the Universal Studios fairground, one of the greatest collections of queues in Japan. It may sound as though we have given up on Japanese culture and are simply seeking cheap thrills at an American theme park, but these parks are actually a key part of Japanese culture. Escapism is huge in Japan thanks to the importance their culture places on conformity, and so theme parks – along with comic books, computer games and the regularly consulted mobile phone – are big business here for adults as well as children.

Universal Studios Japan was built in 2002 as a direct copy of the US version, however this was at a time when most of the US rides were already quite dated. The US site has subsequently been upgraded and replaced, while the Japanese version was presumably too expensive to stand much immediate redevelopment and so remains a fossil of the 1990s original. The somewhat pleasing effect is that the Japanese rides are all based on childhood movie favourites: Jaws, Back To The Future, ET, Spider-Man and – ahem – Backdraft. In fact, so dated are these films, it wasn't lost on us that the 'present' of Back To The Future is now 25 years ago, while the future of those films – all flying cars, Mr Fusion and hover-boards – is just five years away, in 2015. I can hardly wait until I can get my ugly plastic self-expanding jacket.

The best ride by far was Spider-Man, which involved a combination of a roller-coaster ride and 3D Imax, using multiple screens and other effects (water, explosions, strobe lighting, etc) to create a thrilling ride through a New York infested with super villains. Probably the worst – after Backdraft, but only because most of that didn't work at all and so the entire 'ride' just involved a smug (and much younger) Ron Howard wearing an ugly jumper and talking in a very deep Japanese voice – was the ET Experience, in which Steven Spielberg addressed us in the same deep Japanese voice and then we were led into one (apparently deranged) man's vision of what ET's home planet might look like, which comprised a corridor infested with giant smiling cartoon plants.

We also saw the long-awaited sequel to Terminator 2: Judgement Day – T2:3D – in which Arnold Schwarzenegger conveniently forgets that he was burned to death and is not Japanese and rides into the auditorium on a Harley Davison from the post-apocalyptic universe and drags a Japanese John Connor into direct confrontation with Skynet, a glowing pyramid protected by one of the few examples of a T1,000,000 unit. I also finally got to go on the Back To The Future ride, which I remember my cousin Helen telling me about in 1991 when she went to the US park. I remember she sold it well and I was desperate to go on it myself, and it is fortunate for me – 19 years later – that while the ride no longer exists in the US I can still try it here myself in Osaka. It was everything she had promised.

All said and done, then, it may have been a little out dated but it all made for a great deal of fun and was pretty cheap compared to Thorpe Park and Alton Towers in the UK. We returned to Osaka and decided to visit the Sky Garden – two towers topped by a single 'floating garden' 173 metres above ground level – to have a drink while the sun set. 173 metres was a scary enough prospect, but my fear of heights was especially tested when it turned out that the automatic elevator which rose 47 storeys was made of glass, while we then had to ascend the final three storeys in a glass escalator which bridged the space between the two towers. Still, once we were up there it was a pretty spectacular way to see Osaka, with none of the other sky-scrapers even approaching our height.

Back down to earth, we discovered that the plot of open ground next to the Sky Garden towers is a radish patch, which shows an interesting approach to urban planning and land pricing. We had pizza in a local department store, then home.