Disney Planning Aquatic Park in Tokyo : Leisure: Japanese partner will assume most of risk. Similar plan for Long Beach was abandoned.

Walt Disney Co. said Tuesday that it is making plans to build an aquatic theme park in Tokyo, four years after the company scuttled elaborate plans for an oceanfront park in Long Beach.

Disney officials said the park, tentatively called Tokyo DisneySea, will be built in Tokyo Bay and will be owned and operated by Oriental Land Co., the Japanese development company that operates Tokyo Disneyland.

Mirroring the terms of an existing agreement between the two companies, Oriental Land will manage the new park but will pay Burbank-based Disney various licensing fees and royalties, Disney executives said.

The design for DisneySea won’t be completed until next spring, they said, and the park probably won’t open until 2000 or 2001. But a news release distributed in Japan said the park “will feature exotic ports and daring voyages, offering a rich world of thrilling rides, themed dining and unique shopping.”

The design is expected to include re-creations of picturesque coastlines, including a Mediterranean harbor and a U.S. waterfront, the release said.

Plans for the park, which will be built adjacent to the 12-year-old Tokyo Disneyland, were unveiled at a Tuesday morning news conference in Tokyo attended by top Disney executives Michael Eisner and Michael Ovitz.

Tokyo DisneySea would be Disney’s first aquatic theme park and its third park outside the United States, along with Disneyland Paris and Tokyo Disneyland. None of these overseas parks is majority-owned by Disney. The company also has a cluster of three parks in Orlando, Fla., and, of course, the original Disneyland in Anaheim.

Disney executives said plans for DisneySea are unrelated to the short-lived proposal to build a $3-billion aquatic theme park in Long Beach. That project was scrapped in 1991, partly because of opposition from area residents, but primarily because Disney executives could not get legislative approval to add 250 acres of landfill in Long Beach Harbor waters.

Since its retreat from the Long Beach project, Disney has scrapped or scaled back plans for other new parks and expansions in the United States. Last year, it abandoned a proposal to build a history-themed amusement park in Virginia after it encountered opposition from a coalition of local property owners and historians.

Earlier this year, Disney vastly scaled down plans to build a $3-billion resort next to Disneyland, a proposal that had emerged after the Long Beach project was canceled.