High Rollers

There is no clown. That is the first panicked thought of every noodle-gorged gaijin in line at Fujiyama: There is no cutout clown bearing the traditional disclaimer, YOU MUST BE TALLER THAN ME TO RIDE. What if I am too tall, thinks an anxious American who is nine inches taller than the average Japanese male. All of the recorded warnings played in the serpentine line to board Fujiyama—and these warnings are manifold, believe me—are, unhelpfully, in Japanese. All the signs are in kanji.

That changes when you at last approach the loading platform after 90 angst-inducing minutes in line: Adjacent to the platform is a small door painted with the leering cartoon likeness of a barnyard fowl. This is your last chance to exit before you are swept, like a cork on a fast river, onto Fujiyama's malevolent rails. The sign on the door is in English. It reads: CHICKEN GATE.

The Chicken Gate thumbs its beak at current coaster etiquette, according to which parks attempt to allay, not inflame, a rider's anxieties. Near the Hulk at Islands of Adventure, passengers can pick up a pamphlet titled Anxious about Riding. No such luck at Fujiyama, where the only sound on the platform is the metallic echo of the train's lap bars locking into place. It is the sound of finality, like lockdown at Leavenworth.

With a temperamental lurch, the train pulls away from the platform and begins its inexorable climb, 235 feet up the first hill. The angle of ascent leaves the rider in roughly the same position—and disposition—as a dental patient. The only sound now is the ratch-ratch-ratcheting of the chain lift. It recalls to me the rattling chains of Marley's Ghost.

When at last you crest the first hill, there is a pause, long enough to let your knuckle hair stand at attention as you take in the view. Twenty-five stories above the Fujikyu Highlands, you are staring straight at Mount Fuji, and it is breathtaking—so perfect a mountain that it almost seems a theme-park contrivance, like the Matter-horn at Disneyland. You can only gape at it and whisper, "My God, what a lovely...."

Then the bottom falls out of your world.

The first drop at Fujiyama is, in essence, a plane crash. When you pull out of the near-vertical 20-story plunge, your car is traveling about 80 mph toward a course canopied with wooden beams, which appear to be no more than six feet above the track, offering sufficient clearance only to the average Japanese, whose culture promotes something called Tall Poppy Syndrome, in which heads that jut above the crowd must be cut back down to size. Only later do you learn that Tall Poppy Syndrome is a metaphor and that these low beams are a calculated optical illusion known in the coaster trade as Headchoppers. Indeed, a similarly terrifying specimen exists on Shivering Timbers in Muskegon, Mich.

But in the moment, as you hurtle toward presumed decapitation, your thoughts turn to many things: To the vindictiveness of Japanese engineers, to the criminally negligent absence of clowns and to Hirofumi Nakajima, with whom you imprudently engaged in an eating contest scant hours earlier. But before you know what hasn't hit you, you are suddenly—to your profound relief—coasting on small camelbacks into the brake run leading back to the station. You have survived Fujiyama. You have not, moreover, lost it.

Or have you? The souvenir photograph offered at ride's end doesn't lie: Somewhere on the first drop I let fly a Tourette's-like torrent of involuntary profanity. To judge by the photo, in which ampersands and exclamation marks practically billow from my mouth in a cartoon balloon, these epic obscenities came as a revelation to the plaid-skirted Japanese schoolgirls seated in front of me. Each of their mouths is forever frozen in a rictus of disbelief.

For one brief shining moment of American ingenuity, in 1991, Kennywood's Steel Phantom was faster than Fujiyama is today. For its first seven days of operation, the Phantom was the fastest coaster of all time, doing 90 mph, a speed quickly deemed too uncomfortable for humans to endure without lifelong 24-hour chiropractic supervision. So this creature, another spawn of Toomer's evil genius, had to be retrofitted with additional brakes. The Phantom is now more spine-chilling than spine-killing, particularly when it passes beneath the tracks of the Thunderbolt coaster, with which it is entangled.