Universal Studios Japan is an excellent day out including many attractions not found at other Universal Studios theme-parks, like the great Minion Park (a new home for the minions), the epic Flying Dinosaur (worlds longest flying roller coaster at time of opening) and augmented reality Monster Hunter video game experience.

In 2020 a whole new land based on Mario and other Super Nintendo favourites is set to open which will no doubt drive even more visitors to this excellent theme-park.

Universal Studios Japan can get extremely crowded and oftentimes queues for individual attractions are regularly somewhere between 1 and 3 hours long. If like us, you only have a single day within your Japan travel itinerary you really need to consider spending the extra money and buying an Express Pass enabling you to skip the queues for key attractions.

There are a few different options and pricing tiers for express passes and they can be bought at the main ticket offices or online in advance.

However, the Express Pass tickets don’t come cheap, if you buy the most expensive tier it will pretty much double the cost of entry. That being said without buying this ticket for our visit we would not have been able to experience all the attractions we wanted to ride.