By TAKASHI KAJIYAMA/ Staff Writer
December 27, 2019 at 18:35 JST
A miniature of Yoyogi National Stadium gets dusted off by staff at Tobu World Square in Nikko, Tochigi Prefecture, on Dec. 27. (Hiroyuki Yamamoto)
NIKKO, Tochigi Prefecture--Peeling the spider web off the Eiffel Tower required a delicate touch.
Luckily for the person doing it, the tower is only a 13-meter miniature of the real thing.
Staff at the Tobu World Square theme park here on Dec. 27 put their elbow grease into scrubbing the dust off its collection of 102 miniatures that include World Heritage sites and other world-famous structures.
As part of the park's annual year-end cleaning, staff used brushes and cotton swabs to remove dust from the miniatures, which are one-25th of the actual structures' size.
Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral, where work is under way to repair extensive damage from a fire in April that included the loss of its spire, is reproduced at the park, as is Tokyo’s Yoyogi National Stadium, a venue for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
Staff also made a few updates to get the models for the new year.
A small board bearing the kanji “rei,” which is the first character in the name of the new imperial era, was placed at a miniature of Kiyomizudera temple.
Rei was chosen as 2019's kanji of the year on Dec. 12.
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