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Tripped Up: What to Do If Your Travel or Tour Company Goes Bankrupt

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In 2021, my husband, my sister and I signed up for a five-day Tremendous Tawas Lake Huron tour run by Pardson, the Ohio company that publishes Bird Watcher’s Digest magazine. We paid almost $4,800 in all. The tour was canceled because of Covid that year, but we were so eager to see the rare Kirtland’s warbler that we accepted a credit. Shortly before the rescheduled trip was to leave in May 2022, the company emailed to tell us it was going out of business, and someone would contact us about a refund. No one did, but through my own efforts I got in touch with Jack Harris, the receiver responsible for the dissolution of Pardson. He told me the only way to get my money back would be through my credit card. But American Express said I was too late. Can you help? Paige, Atlanta

My inbox is full of messages from people who, like you, gave no thought to whether the company they booked a trip with would remain solvent until their departure date.

Most of those complaints, though, concern lost flights and cruises, not the missed chance to see a yellow-breasted songbird so rare that it breeds almost exclusively in the shade of young jack pine trees of Michigan and Wisconsin.

What this avian cutie has against the shade of more mature trees is beyond the scope of this column. But I can tell you the frustrating reason behind your money being gone forever — even though many others, in similar situations, can get their money back relatively easily.

We are talking, essentially, about bankruptcy. But I’m not using that term here because, technically, it applies only to cases filed in the federal court system — often using the infamous Chapters 7 and 11 statutes. Pardson, the company that published the birding magazine since 1978 and ran its tours, filed in the Ohio state court system.

But for our purposes, the federal and state processes are, like crows and ravens, more alike than different. And in both systems, there is one pretty straightforward way for travelers to recover their money, and another — with much longer odds — if the first way fails.

The easy way is through a credit card, although only under specific conditions. To begin, the traveler has to have used a credit card — debit cards and other forms of payment won’t work. That’s because credit card issuers must follow the Fair Credit Billing Act, signed into law by President Gerald R. Ford in 1974. Under one provision of this law, credit card issuers are required to refund card holders who were victims of billing errors.

The law’s definitions of “billing error” includes a company’s later failure to deliver a good or service. How does a bankruptcy retroactively turn what was a legitimate purchase into a billing error? I don’t know, but I’m not complaining.

You did use a credit card, an Amex with an annual fee of $500. But it turns out the magazine gave you bad advice when they canceled the tour in 2022 and told you to wait for someone to get in touch about a refund. If they had instead recommended you contact your credit card company immediately, you would likely have gotten your money back.

That is true even though the Fair Credit Billing Act technically requires you to get in touch with your card issuer within 60 days of purchase. In an email, American Express spokeswoman Jessica Defilippo wrote: “Generally, the 60-day limit can be extended to give card members up to 120 days from the time of purchase, or in the case of pre-booked travel, from the date travel was intended to take place.”

That last part is the key, since many people book travel far in advance. Spokesmen from Bank of America and Chase told me their credit cards have similar policies.

That’s great for everyone but you. You mentioned Mr. Harris, the receiver with Pardson, advised you to try American Express and explain to them you only just found out about the company’s collapse.

That was nearly 11 months after your travel date, though, and as you know, American Express rejected your claim, likely because it had just been too long. (Ms. Defilippo wrote that “every case is evaluated uniquely,” but that she could not comment on your specific case.)

That leaves you with the second and more treacherous road to a refund: to file a claim on the liquidated assets of the company, now controlled by Mr. Harris and subject to approval by the Court of Common Pleas of Washington County, Ohio.

Marvin Sicherman, a longtime bankruptcy attorney who also teaches law at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, sought to dampen any expectations. His take, after I described your case:

“I like to tell people who are creditors, ‘Close your eyes. What do you see? Nothing? Well, that’s what you’re going to recover.’”

Mr. Harris declined to comment. I knew the court documents would contain the information, but struggled to access them until I got a deft assist from Brenda Wolfe, Washington County clerk of courts in since 1979. (She picked up my cold call on the first ring.)

The documents showed that when Pardson failed, it had very few assets beyond a van and computer equipment. When I forwarded the documents to Mr. Sicherman, he said that those assets would likely cover little more than Mr. Harris’s fees. Anything beyond that, he said, would go to employees or secured creditors, like a bank that could repossess property from a mortgage or car loan. For you, as an unsecured creditor, filing a claim is unlikely to be worth the time.

The court documents did reveal that Mr. Harris got the judge to approve the sale of the magazine itself to a new owner. But that owner, which renamed the magazine BWD, only took on the responsibility of fulfilling about $200,000 in unfulfilled subscriptions to subscribers, not any liabilities with tours.

The new publisher also did not respond to my emails, but a local NBC affiliate report from March 2022 noted that the new publisher had taken on some of the old staff, and — frustratingly for you — that one of the reasons the magazine went under was “having to issue refunds to birding tours due to the pandemic.”

That leads us to a two-part lesson. Part I: When a trip is canceled and you are given the choice between getting your money back or accepting credit, take the money. Part II: When you are not given a choice, plead for the money anyway, since if the company fails or never runs the tour, you’re out of luck.

Here’s a small piece of good news for everyone: the scenario above typically applies when a company is dissolved, never to be seen again. There is more hope for consumers when a corporation reorganizes through bankruptcy, since companies may strive to not alienate loyal customers.

And then there’s the lesson Jenn of Brooklyn, another Tripped Up reader, learned earlier this year. Her family’s New York to Sicily trip was disrupted when Flyr, a two-year-old Norwegian carrier, filed for bankruptcy in January, foiling her husband and sons’ plans to fly a major airline to Oslo and then hop Flyr’s bargain Oslo-to-Palermo route. When Flyr went under, they were stuck with round-trip tickets to Oslo and no easy way to get from there to Italy. After writing to me, but still within 60 days of purchase, Jenn sought and received a refund from her Chase Sapphire Preferred card. But the cost and inconvenience of piecing together new, indirect flights has left her ruing the day that she tried to save money with an untested airline.

When I suggested to Mr. Sicherman that travelers might want to avoid newer, untested companies, he told me it wasn’t that simple. “The typical consumer has no way of determining the creditworthiness of any business entity they do business with,” he said.

But thanks to that Ford-era law, you can minimize your risk by using the best credit card you’ve got.

If you need advice about a best-laid travel plan that went awry, send an email to TrippedUp@nytimes.com.

Oppenheimer Review: A Man for Our Time

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The film’s virtuosity is evident in every frame, but this is virtuosity without self-aggrandizement. Big subjects can turn even well-intended filmmakers into show-offs, to the point that they upstage the history they seek to do justice to. Nolan avoids that trap by insistently putting Oppenheimer into a larger context, notably with the black-and-white portions. One section turns on a politically motivated security clearance hearing in 1954, a witch hunt that damaged his reputation; the second follows the 1959 confirmation for Lewis Strauss (a mesmerizing, near-unrecognizable Downey), a former chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission who was nominated for a cabinet position.

Nolan integrates these black-and-white sections with the color ones, using scenes from the hearing and the confirmation — Strauss’s role in the hearing and his relationship with Oppenheimer directly affected the confirmation’s outcome — to create a dialectical synthesis. One of the most effective examples of this approach illuminates how Oppenheimer and other Jewish project scientists, some of whom were refugees from Nazi Germany, saw their work in stark, existential terms. Yet Oppenheimer’s genius, his credentials, international reputation and wartime service to the United States government cannot save him from political gamesmanship, the vanity of petty men and the naked antisemitism of the Red scare.

These black-and-white sequences define the last third of “Oppenheimer.” They can seem overlong, and at times in this part of the film it feels as if Nolan is becoming too swept up in the trials that America’s most famous physicist experienced. Instead, it is here that the film’s complexities and all its many fragments finally converge as Nolan puts the finishing touches on his portrait of a man who contributed to an age of transformational scientific discovery, who personified the intersection of science and politics, including in his role as a communist boogeyman, who was transformed by his role in the creation of weapons of mass destruction and soon after raised the alarm about the dangers of nuclear war.

François Truffaut once wrote that “war films, even pacifist, even the best, willingly or not, glorify war and render it in some way attractive.” This, I think, gets at why Nolan refuses to show the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, world-defining events that eventually killed an estimated 100,000 to upward of 200,000 souls. You do, though, see Oppenheimer watch the first test bomb and, critically, you also hear the famous words that he said crossed his mind as the mushroom cloud rose: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” As Nolan reminds you, the world quickly moved on from the horrors of the war to embrace the bomb. Now we, too, have become death, the destroyers of worlds.

Oppenheimer
Rated R for disturbing images, and adult language and behavior. Running time: 3 hours. In theaters.

Health Insures Deny Medical Care for the Poor at High Rates, Report Says

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Private health insurance companies paid by Deny Medical Care millions of requests for care for low-income Americans with little oversight from federal and state authorities, according to a new report by U.S. investigators published Wednesday.

Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program for the poor that covers nearly 87 million people, contracts with companies to reimburse hospitals and doctors for treatment and to manage an individual’s medical care. About three-quarters of people enrolled in Medicaid receive health services through private companies, which are typically paid a fixed amount per patient rather than for each procedure or visit.

The report by the inspector general’s office of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services details how often private insurance plans refused to approve treatment and how states handled the denials.

Doctors and hospitals have increasingly complained about what they consider to be endless paperwork and unjustified refusals of care by the insurers when they fail to authorize costly procedures or medicines. The companies that require prior authorization for certain types of medical services say these tools are aimed at curbing unnecessary or unproven treatments, but doctors claim it often interferes with making sure patients receive the services they need.

The investigators also raised concerns about the payment structure that provides lump sums per patient. They worried it would encourage some insurers to maximize their profits by denying medical care and access to services for the poor.

The report emphasized the crucial role that state and federal officials should play to ensure the denials were justified. “People of color and people with lower incomes are at increased risk of receiving low-quality health care and experiencing poor health outcomes, which makes ensuring access to care particularly critical for the Medicaid population,” the investigators said.

The for-profit insurance companies, including Aetna, Elevance Health, Molina Healthcare and UnitedHealthcare, operated some Medicaid plans that denied medical care under requests for prior authorization of services by rates that were greater than 25 percent in 2019, the report found. About 2.7 million people were enrolled in these plans at the time. Another 8.4 million were enrolled in plans with above-average denial rates from 15 to 25 percent.

Molina, based in Long Beach, Calif., operated seven plans with denial rates greater than 25 percent, according to the report. Its Illinois plan denied 41 percent of requests.

Kristine Grow, a spokeswoman for AHIP (formerly America’s Health Insurance Plans), an industry trade group, said in a statement that insurers “are held accountable through extensive oversight” by the federal and state governments.

The companies named in the inspector general’s report did not respond immediately to requests for comment.

Doctors agree that Medicaid patients may not wait for the insurer to approve the care, let alone reverse its decision. “You don’t always have the opportunity to see a patient, send in a prior authorization request and schedule them back in,” said Dr. Matthew Stinson, who works at the Jordan Valley Community Health Center in Springfield, Mo., which sees a large number of Medicaid patients. “It’s an access problem.”

Some of the clinic’s patients will skip care, he said. When an insurer denies an ultrasound for a pregnant woman, the center may decide to perform the test anyway because she may not return. “We don’t necessarily get paid for that ultrasound,” Dr. Stinson said.

The concern over inappropriate denials is not limited to Medicaid. Last year, the same investigators examined denials among private Medicare Advantage plans and found that some of the care that was rejected may have, in fact, been medically necessary. While the current report did not look at whether the Medicaid denials were valid, the investigators emphasized the insurers were much more aggressive in refusing to authorize care under Medicaid than under Medicare, the federal program for the elderly and disabled.

The companies denied one of eight requests in 2019, roughly two times the rate under Medicare Advantage, they said. Unlike with Medicare, if an insurer refuses to authorize a treatment, patients are not automatically provided with an outside medical opinion as part of their appeal. They are entitled to a state hearing.

“These differences in oversight and access to external medical reviews between the two programs raise concerns about health equity and access to care for Medicaid managed care enrollees,” the investigators said.

Patients also complain that it’s difficult to get care under these plans. Bri Moss, 34, in Dubuque, Iowa, has been diagnosed with diabetes since she was 12, but struggled to get her Medicaid plan to approve a doctor-recommended new insulin pump to help control her blood sugar.

“It might be a game changer for me,” said Ms. Moss, who added that her insurer initially would not cover it. Working with People’s Action, a national advocacy network, and a sister organization, Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, where she is a member, Ms. Moss eventually won an appeal to get the device covered.

The investigators also found that state oversight of coverage denials was lax. Many states do not routinely examine the insurers’ denials nor collect information about how many times a plan denies requests for prior authorization. They do not make sure people can get another medical opinion if they want to appeal. The lack of review makes it challenging for federal and state officials to know if the insurers “are living up to their commitments to ensure coverage of medically necessary health care,” according to the report.

“In the absence of federal requirements, we see these three tools being used inconsistently,” said Rosemary Bartholomew, who helped lead the team that developed the report.

States are directly responsible for overseeing insurance providers of Medicaid coverage. But investigators urged the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to require more oversight.

In the report, federal officials did not say whether they agreed with the investigators’ recommendations, and C.M.S. said it planned to review the report’s findings to determine any next steps.

The denial rates recorded by the investigators varied widely by insurer and by state. The investigators looked at 115 managed care organizations in 37 states operated by the seven multistate insurers with the highest Medicaid enrollment, representing some 30 million people in 2019. They requested information about denials from the insurers and surveyed the states about their oversight role.

Elevance, the for-profit insurer previously known as Anthem, had plans with denial rates that varied from 6 to 34 percent, while UnitedHealthcare had plans that had rates ranging from 7 to 27 percent.

“Although any individual prior authorization denial may be appropriate, it is unclear why some M.C.O.s,” or managed care organizations, “had rates of prior authorization denials that were so much higher than their peers,” the investigators said.

Ex-officer Derek Chauvin to ask US Supreme Court to review his conviction in murder of George Floyd

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MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Former Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review his conviction for second-degree murder in the killing of George Floyd, now that the Minnesota Supreme Court has declined to hear the case, his attorney said Wednesday.

The state’s highest court without comment denied Chauvin’s petition in a one-page order dated Tuesday, letting Chauvin’s conviction and 22 1/2-year sentence stand. Chauvin faces long odds at the U.S. Supreme Court, which hears only about 100 to 150 appeals of the more than 7,000 cases it is asked to review every year.

Floyd, who was Black, died on May 25, 2020, after Chauvin, who is white, pressed a knee on his neck for 9 1/2 minutes on the street outside a convenience store where Floyd tried to pass a counterfeit $20 bill. A bystander video captured Floyd’s fading cries of “I can’t breathe.” Floyd’s death touched off protests worldwide, some of which turned violent, and forced a national reckoning with police brutality and racism that is still playing out.

Chauvin’s attorney, William Mohrmann, told The Associated Press that they were “obviously disappointed” in the decision. He said the most significant issue on which they appealed was whether holding the proceedings in Minneapolis in 2021 deprived Chauvin of his right to a fair trial due to pretrial publicity and concerns for violence in the event of an acquittal. He said they will now raise that issue with the U.S. Supreme Court.

“This criminal trial generated the most amount of pretrial publicity in history,” Morhmann said. “More concerning are the riots which occurred after George Floyd’s death (and) led the jurors to all express concerns for their safety in the event they acquitted Mr. Chauvin — safety concerns which were fully evidenced by surrounding the courthouse in barbed wire and National Guard troops during the trial and deploying the National Guard throughout Minneapolis prior to jury deliberations.”

Mohrmann asked the Minnesota Supreme Court in May to hear the case after the Minnesota Court of Appeals in April rejected his arguments that he had been denied a fair trial. The Minnesota attorney general’s office, in a response last month, asked the Supreme Court to let that ruling stand instead.

“Petitioner received a fair trial, and received the benefit of a fulsome appellate review,” prosecutors wrote at the time. “It is time to bring this case to a close.”

The attorney general’s office did not immediately reply to a request for comment Wednesday.

Morhman asked the Court of Appeals and the Minnesota Supreme Court to throw out the ex-officer’s conviction for a long list of reasons, including the decision by Hennepin County Judge Peter Cahill not to move the trial out of Minneapolis despite the massive pretrial publicity, and the potential prejudicial effects of unprecedented courthouse security.

After his conviction on the state charge, Chauvin pleaded guilty to a separate federal civil rights charge and was sentenced to 21 years in federal prison, which he is serving in Arizona concurrent with his state sentence. Three other former officers who assisted Chauvin are serving shorter state and-or federal sentences for their roles in the case.

Only Tou Thao, who held back the concerned crowd, still faces sentencing in state court. That’s scheduled for Aug. 7. Thao rejected a plea agreement and, instead of going to trial, let Cahill decide the case based on written filings by each side and evidence presented in previous trials.

Cahill convicted Thao in May of aiding and abetting manslaughter. Minnesota guidelines recommend four years on the manslaughter count, which Thao would serve concurrently with his 3 1/2-year federal sentence.

Carl Erskine Will Receive Hall of Fame’s Buck O’Neil Award

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They were instilled, in a graphic way, when Erskine’s father, Matt, took him to Marion, Ind., in 1930, the morning after a mob had stormed a jailhouse and hanged two Black prisoners. Matt Erskine wanted his son to see the effects of hate.

The sight of a bare tree branch and remnant of a noose has been seared in Carl Erskine’s consciousness ever since. In a state that once counted about 30 percent of the male population as dues-paying members of the Ku Klux Klan, Erskine grew up with a Black best friend, Johnny Wilson — a distinction, he said, that should earn him no special accolades.

“I lived in a mixed neighborhood and I knew a lot of outstanding Black families, hard-working families, and Johnny was a buddy,” Erskine said. “I ate at his house, he ate at my house, and we were just very, very close. I never noticed the color of the skin. It never played a part in our relationship. So it’s hard for me to take any credit for that, because it just came natural for me.”

On the top shelf of a cabinet in the Erskines’ living room is a figurine Wilson gave to his old pal: two boys — one Black, one white — on a bench in baseball uniforms. Tucked behind it is Wilson’s note: “Like when we were young.”

Wilson died in 2019. Roger Craig, the last Dodger besides Erskine who played in that 1955 World Series, died last month. Two of Erskine’s children, Gary and Susie, will represent him in Cooperstown, part of a sprawling family that includes five grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren, including a girl named Brooklyn.

Erskine’s name will be on permanent display at the Hall of Fame by the Buck O’Neil statue, just down a hallway and around the corner from the plaque gallery. That room honors the most hallowed Brooklyn names — Robinson, Campanella, Snider, Reese, Hodges and more — and, to Erskine, sends a subtle but powerful message he has spent his life promoting.

“There’s one key factor about the plaques around that room at the Hall of Fame,” Erskine said. “They’re all bronze. They’re all the same color.”

Ghibli Park Celebrates “Totoro” And Other Miyazaki Movies

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One of our first infractions at Ghibli Park was hoisting our 1-year-old onto the polyester tummy of a woodland spirit creature. Another was letting him slip under a barricade and shelter inside a furry bus with cat eyes for headlights.

“He’s not following the protocol,” I told my wife, as the staff overseeing the cat-bus play zone looked on anxiously.

“He’s making a mockery of it,” she said. But we didn’t stop him.

Ghibli Park, which opened in November outside Nagoya, Japan, pays homage to the eccentric, enchanting films of Studio Ghibli, a company co-founded in the 1980s by the director Hayao Miyazaki. We took our two toddlers there because their favorite movie is “My Neighbor Totoro,” a beloved 1988 Miyazaki film starring the spirit creature and its cat-bus sidekick.

As parents, we thought it would be fun for our boys, 3 and 1, to experience a “Totoro” immersion. And as longtime Ghibli fans, we were keen to see what the place looked like.

American visitors may wonder how Ghibli Park compares with Disney World. It doesn’t really. It feels much lower-key and has no rides, exotic animals, jumbo turkey legs or animatronic American presidents, among other things. The main point is to wander around soaking up Miyazaki vibes.

Also, the park is not finished. Grafted onto an existing municipal park, it opened late last year, but as of early July only three of five planned ticketed sites were open. When I booked for a June visit, tickets to only one of those sites — a building called “Ghibli’s Grand Warehouse” — were available to international visitors reserving through the park’s website. (It was possible to book the other two sites through Japanese travel agencies, but I only learned that much later, from a Japanese speaker.)

Susan Napier, a biographer of Mr. Miyazaki at Tufts University who visited Ghibli Park in April, told me that it had struck her as a “work in progress.” She also described the ticketing process, which has included lotteries and long online queues, as “byzantine and not fun.”

Maybe this is why Studio Ghibli itself seems ambivalent about promoting Ghibli Park. In Japan, it has run advertisements advising fans to “take your time” visiting.

A hypothetical theme park celebrating Nintendo or Pokemon, two other iconic Japanese creative brands, would almost certainly feel more Disney World-like, said Matt Alt, the author of the 2021 book “Pure Invention: How Japan’s Pop Culture Conquered the World.” But he added that the park’s diffuse layout and low-key marketing were in character for a studio co-founded by Mr. Miyazaki, a director who has never hidden his anticapitalist politics.

Ghibli Park is not a place to “turn your brain off,” Mr. Alt told me. “It demands a level of intellectual engagement that most parks do not.” When I booked our visit, in March, a bit of mental stimulation sounded nice. I imagined wandering the grounds in dappled sunlight, musing on Mr. Miyazaki’s cinematic oeuvre as our boys paused to collect acorns — just as the two sisters who star in “Totoro” do. (The boys, who are Anglo-American, love the acorn scenes so much that they learned the Japanese word for the nut, donguri, before the English one.)

In reality, we arrived just before our three-hour afternoon visiting slot at Ghibli’s Grand Warehouse, and our intellectual capacity was limited. Our parental nerves were fraying from the hourlong journey from Nagoya and the general struggle of moving tiny, diapered humans around an unfamiliar place.

Our morning in Nagoya had already been tarnished by a 4 a.m. wake up and some public displays of unchecked toddler emotion. On the grounds of the 17th century Nagoya Castle, for example, our 3-year-old, nicknamed T, burst into tears when he learned that the castle was closed for renovation.

To break his mood, we took the emergency measure of buying him and his brother, nicknamed B, ice cream cones as a second breakfast. That stopped the crying, but our mounting fatigue had raised the stakes for our visit to Ghibli Park. Would the trip to meet our favorite magical creatures make all the time, money and energy that it entailed worthwhile?

Ghibli Park may see a bump in domestic tourism this summer because Mr. Miyazaki released a new film in Japan this month. But, for my family, making a pilgrimage there was all about seeing Totoro and the cat bus.

“Totoro” follows the two sisters, Mei, 4, and Satsuki, 10, as they settle into a spooky house in the Japanese countryside with their father, an archaeologist. Their mother is stuck in a nearby sanitarium, suffering from an undisclosed illness.

After Mei meets Totoro by stumbling into its lair inside a giant camphor tree (and falls asleep on its tummy), she and her sister encounter the creature a few more times and learn more about its magical powers. Eventually, as their mother’s condition appears to worsen, they call in some very important favors from Totoro and the wild-eyed cat bus.

Professor Napier told me that “Totoro” illustrates an aesthetic that runs through the Ghibli catalog, and which tends to be more ambiguous and subtle than Disney’s. She described it as “the immersive, low-key magic of being a human being connected with other things.”

“It’s a world that you like,” Professor Napier, who is writing a book comparing Ghibli with Disney, said of Mr. Miyazaki’s animated universe. “But it’s also full of the unexpected and complex, and sometimes scary.”

Totoro and the cat bus can indeed be a little frightening, especially when they flash their teeth. But the movie is much sweeter than it is scary. It’s set in “a time before television,” as Mr. Miyazaki once told an interviewer, and infused with sublime, hand-drawn pastoral imagery — pastel sunsets, a snail crawling up a plant stalk — that makes you want to be a kid growing up in rural idyll.

The film also celebrates a child’s sense of wonder. Mr. Miyazaki created “Totoro” with kids in mind — he said he hoped it would make them want to pick acorns — and many critics have seen it as an ode to childhood innocence. It’s no accident that Totoro and the cat bus are visible only to the sisters, not adults.

Maybe this is why I still cry every time I watch the final credits roll: “Totoro” reminds me that my boys will never be this young or innocent again.

In our Seoul apartment, they play with Totoro and cat-bus dolls, sleep in Totoro pajamas and sit on a Totoro potty. Their fandom is so intense that my mother-in-law bought us tickets to a “Totoro” stage adaptation at the Barbican Theater during our last trip to London.

In Nagoya, before we left for Ghibli Park, B demonstrated his enthusiasm by bringing a plastic cat bus to the hotel buffet — and feeding it a breakfast of whipped cream. He also showed the toy to a man in a ninja costume who posed for a selfie with us outside the castle.

The ninja cracked a knowing smile, indicating that he, too, was a “Totoro” fan. “Cat bus,” he said in Japanese, as if the phrase were a code word.

Ghibli Park lies in Nagakute, a small city in the hills outside Nagoya, a few stops down a highway from an Ikea. There’s no Ghibli entrance gate, exactly; you just wander into an unremarkable municipal park and look around for the Ghibli sites for which you have reserved tickets months in advance.

The Grand Warehouse is a sleek, multistory building the size of a modest mall or sports arena, with plenty of sunshine streaming in through skylights. It sits near a grassy lawn, an ice rink and some future Ghibli sites that are under construction.

Inside, there are replicas of structures from the films, including the towering bathhouse from the Oscar-winning 2001 film “Spirited Away,” and dozens of made-for-Instagram tableaux of Ghibli scenes and props.

The attention to detail is striking. In an area devoted to the Ghibli film “Arietty,” I saw a giant drop of plastic dew affixed to a giant fake flower, for example. Nearby was an intricately detailed replica of the castle from “Howl’s Moving Castle,” my older son’s favorite Miyazaki film after “Totoro.”

“The castle, daddy!” Three-year-old T said with delight. At last, a Japanese castle that didn’t make him cry.

The problem was that most of the tableaux were mobbed with Ghibli fans — and lines that we didn’t have time to stand in with restless toddlers. The building’s only restaurant was similarly oversubscribed. We eventually found a kiosk advertising cake, but the staff said that the cake had run out.

After about an hour of canvassing the warehouse, we headed for “Children’s Town,” a play area devoted to scenes from “Totoro” and other Ghibli films.

Children’s Town has three rooms. The first is a labyrinth combining scenes from more Ghibli films than I could count: The orange train from “Laputa: Castle in the Sky,” the bakery from “Kiki’s Delivery Service” and so on. The boys loved it, even if daddy thwacked his head following them through a crawl space.

The other rooms were devoted to “Totoro” and had mercifully higher ceilings. There was the house where Mei and Satsuki live with their dad. Over there was the camphor tree, where a giant Totoro lay regally beside some oversize donguri. And in the far corner sat the majestic, furry cat bus.

It all looked fun, kid-friendly and immersive — almost, in fact, like something you’d find at Disney World. The boys were in heaven.

“Toe-toe-row! Toe-toe-row!” B said, standing inside the tree, with the same intonation as the movie’s rousing, marching-band-style theme song.

“Hey, Totoro!” said T, who had been carefully inspecting the giant acorns. “Wake up!”

But even though Children’s Town seemed designed to nurture the child’s sense of wonder that Mr. Miyazaki celebrates in his movies, the warehouse staff informed us of several rules that dampened the vibe. Notably, it was forbidden to put children on Totoro’s plush tummy, or to allow them to play inside the cat bus zone for longer than three minutes — even if the zone was not crowded, which it wasn’t.

The staff members were friendly, but their rules made little sense for kids as small as ours. I wondered if that was another sign that Ghibli Park was still a bit rough around the edges. Take your time visiting, as the studio says.

We grudgingly agreed to the no-tummy policy, but B wished to play nowhere else but inside the cat bus. We were with him. We had spent several months — a good chunk of his life! — waiting for this moment.

The staff, sensing our resolve, suggested a compromise. A special time extension could be granted under the circumstances, they said. Rather than the usual three minutes, our B could have six.

Make that nine. Then 12. Et cetera. At 5 p.m., he was among last, and smallest, Ghibli fans to leave the building.

Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2023.

Prosecutors and Trump Lawyers Meet in Court in Classified Documents Case

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Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump and the federal prosecutors who charged him with illegally holding on to highly sensitive national defense documents began a first hearing on Tuesday with the judge overseeing the case to discuss the scheduling of the trial and how to handle the classified material at the heart of the prosecution.

The hearing, in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., is the first time that Judge Aileen M. Cannon has presided over a proceeding in the case, parts of which could be closed to the public. Mr. Trump was indicted last month by the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, on charges of illegally retaining 31 individual classified documents and of conspiring with one of his personal aides, Walt Nauta, to obstruct the government’s repeated efforts to reclaim them.

The hearing got underway hours after Mr. Trump disclosed that he had received a so-called target letter from Mr. Smith in a separate criminal investigation into his efforts to remain in office after his 2020 election loss and the ensuing attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The target letter was an indication that Mr. Trump could face indictment in that inquiry as well.

The defense and prosecution in the documents case have clashed sharply over when the trial should begin. The government has asked Judge Cannon to start the trial in December, but lawyers for Mr. Trump and Mr. Nauta responded with a request to postpone it until all “substantive motions” were presented and resolved.

The timing of the trial could be hugely consequential, especially if it is pushed after the 2024 election. If Mr. Trump, the current front-runner for the Republican nomination, were to win, he could try to pardon himself after taking office or could have his attorney general simply dismiss the matter entirely.

In an order issued on Monday, Judge Cannon told both sides that they should be prepared to discuss the trial schedule in court on Tuesday. Her decision will be an early test of how she handles the high-stakes prosecution of the man who appointed her to the bench in 2020. While Judge Cannon was randomly assigned to the case, she has attracted much attention with rulings that were favorable to Mr. Trump in the opening stage of the investigation.

Shortly after the indictment was returned, Judge Cannon scheduled the trial to begin in August — though that appeared to be a pro forma date guided by a desire to meet requirements for a speedy trial. In a filing last week, lawyers for Mr. Trump and Mr. Nauta asked the judge to delay the trial indefinitely, claiming that the discovery evidence in the case was expansive, that the arguments over classified materials would be onerous and that Mr. Trump, as a presidential candidate, had a grueling schedule of travel and campaign events.

Prosecutors responded by saying much of the evidence had already been handed over to the defense and that many “indicted defendants have demanding jobs that require a considerable amount of their time and energy, or a significant amount of travel.”

The arguments over the classified materials were set to begin in earnest on Tuesday in a process guided by a law known as the Classified Information Procedures Act. The purpose of the law is to balance two competing interests in cases that involve classified material: ensuring that criminal defendants have sufficient access to the material to protect their due process rights and that national security is not compromised.

On Monday, prosecutors asked Judge Cannon to issue an order that would require Mr. Trump, Mr. Nauta and their lawyers to sign a formal memorandum of understanding declaring that they would not disclose any classified material they received or were permitted to review as part of the discovery process. Protective orders like these are common in cases involving classified material.

North Korea Detains U.S. Soldier After Unauthorized Border Crossing

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An American soldier who crossed into North Korea without authorization on Tuesday has been taken into custody by North Korean authorities, according to U.S. officials.

The service member crossed into North Korea during a tour of Panmunjom, or the Joint Security Area, which straddles the inter-Korean border, becoming the latest U.S. citizen to be detained by the isolated Communist country.

The soldier had recently been released from a South Korean prison after being arrested on assault charges, according to a U.S. official familiar with the situation who was not authorized to speak on the record. He was to return to Fort Bliss, Texas, to face additional military disciplinary actions.

The service member was escorted to the airport, but instead of boarding his plane, he joined a tour of the Joint Security Area, where he broke away from the group and ran across the border, the official said. The tour guides chased after him, but did not catch him, and he was seen being taken into custody by North Korean soldiers.

The soldier, whose identity has not been released, “willfully and without authorization crossed the Military Demarcation Line into the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” said Col. Isaac Taylor, a public affairs officer for the U.S. Forces Korea.

“We believe he is currently in D.P.R.K. custody,” Colonel Taylor said, adding that U.S. officials were working with their counterparts in the North Korean military to resolve the incident.

The United States and North Korea have no formal diplomatic relations, and U.S. interests in the country are formally represented by the Swedish Embassy there.

During a news conference on Tuesday, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III said the U.S. military was “closely monitoring and investigating the situation, and working to notify the soldier’s next of kin.”

“I’m absolutely foremost concerned about the welfare of our troop,” Mr. Austin said.

The American-led United Nations Command first confirmed the border crossing Tuesday.

Both the U.N. Command and the North Korean People’s Army keep duty officers at Panmunjom, the sole point of contact on the 155-mile-long Demilitarized Zone that separates the two Koreas.

The U.N. Command allows tour groups in the Joint Security Area, which was created as part of the 1953 armistice that halted the Korean War 70 years ago next week. Tourists can visit the area from South Korea while unarmed soldiers trail closely behind.

The soldier detained on Tuesday was the first known American held in North Korean custody since​ Bruce Byron Lowrance​ was detained for a month after illegally entering the country from China in 2018.​

The American student Otto F. Warmbier was arrested in Pyongyang in 2016, accused of trying to steal a propaganda poster from the wall of his hotel. Mr. Warmbier was sentenced to 15 years in prison. After being held for 17 months in North Korea, Mr. Warmbier, then 20, was flown from Pyongyang to Ohio, his home state, in a coma in June 2017. He died a week later.

​Although the inter-Korean border is strewn with land mines and guarded by layers of tall barbed-wire fences, people from both Koreas have crossed the DMZ, as have several American soldiers stationed in the South.

In 2014, an unidentified American was detained on a riverbank near the South’s western border with North Korea after trying to swim into the North. After he was apprehended, he told South Korean officials that he had intended to go to North Korea to meet its leader, Kim Jong-un. Before he entered North Korea from China, Mr. Lowrance was also detained by South Korean soldiers while approaching the inter-Korean border.

But defections through Panmunjom are highly unusual.

A South Korean soldier assigned to the Joint Security Area defected to the North in 1991. In 2017, a North Korean soldier​ ran across ​Panmunjom through a hail of bullets ​from fellow Communist soldiers trying to stop him. The defector survived multiple bullet wounds.

Relations between North Korea and the United States have deteriorated in recent years as the North has ramped up its nuclear and missile programs, defying international sanctions.

The fate of American citizens held in North Korea is not always clear. Some are voluntarily released, while others have faced criminal charges of committing “hostile acts” and​ have been freed only when American officials, like former President Bill Clinton, have visited Pyongyang to request their release.

North Korea released three American detainees in ​2018 after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Pyongyang to pick them up. North Korea treated their release as a sign of good will and a merciful diplomatic gesture aimed at facilitating ​Mr. Kim’s summit meeting with President Donald J. Trump in Singapore ​later that year.

Panmunjom has long been a popular tourist destination for foreign visitors in South Korea. It is the only place inside the 2.5-mile-wide DMZ where tourists are allowed. It is also the only place where outsiders can sometimes watch North Korean soldiers at close hand.

On a typical tour, visitors are escorted into the Joint Security Area by South Korean and U.S. soldiers wearing U.N. arm bands. They look at the Bridge of No Return, where Korean prisoner of war exchanges took place in 1953. They also visit a monument to a South Korean soldier who was shot dead during a gunfight triggered by a Soviet citizen’s defection to the West through Panmunjom in 1984.

At Panmunjom, no wall or fence separates the two Koreas. Only a low-rising cement slab barely a half-foot tall marks the official demarcation line. But no visitors from either side are allowed to step over the line, as President Trump did when he met Mr. Kim in 2019. A highlight of the tour comes when visitors are escorted into a blue joint conference room and are allowed to walk into the North Korean half.

North Korean soldiers watch the visitors from the South carefully, sometimes staring into the joint conference room. But since the pandemic, they have avoided coming closer to outside visitors.

Choe Sang-Hun reported from Seoul, Michael D. Shear and John Ismay from Washington. Edward Wong contributed reporting from Washington.

Jack Smith’s latest move means Trump can’t use Judge Cannon to prevent pre-election trial

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Jack Smith Tom Brenner for The Washington Post via Getty Images
Jack Smith Tom Brenner for The Washington Post via Getty Images

Legal experts expect Donald Trump to be indicted in the Justice Department’s Jan. 6 probe after he received a target letter from special counsel Jack Smith’s team, predicting it will blow up the former president’s attempts to delay his federal proceedings until after the 2024 election. Smith informed Trump that he is a target of the probe after bringing charges against him in the Mar-a-Lago documents probe. Trump has sought to delay the trial indefinitely, citing his election campaign.

“This means that Trump will be indicted in the January 6th investigation,” former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti tweeted about the target letter. “This indictment will likely be brought in D.C. federal court, which means that the importance of Judge Aileen Cannon’s rulings in the Mar-a-Lago case are diminished.” MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin agreed that the implication of the likely indictment in D.C. is that even “if Cannon caves to Trump’s demands not to set ANY trial date, she now can’t single-handedly prevent a federal trial before Election Day. The federal judges in DC have handled [hundreds] of 1/6 cases rapidly—and his should be no exception.”

Former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman called the looming D.C. indictment a “seismic event that among other things will recalibrate the timeline.” Most judges in D.C., he added, “are used to (and fed up with) Trump’s maneuvers and sensitive to need to move quickly.”

Denmark’s Jonas Vingegaard Nears Victory in the Tour de France

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Denmark’s Jonas Vingegaard fired off a blistering ride on a hilly time trial in the Tour de France on Tuesday, winning the stage and seizing control of the race with less than a week until its finish in Paris. His time over the 14 miles was a yawning 1 minute 38 seconds better than that of his rival, Tadej Pogacar, and that lengthened his 10-second overall lead to 1:48, potentially a decisive margin.

For two weeks, Pogacar, of Slovenia, had been whittling away at the early lead of Vingegaard, of Denmark, using his fierce acceleration in carefully timed bursts to blast away on the steepest mountain climbs and steal seconds. The result has been the greatest head-to-head Tour battle in many years.

But sudden acceleration and tactical subtlety were less important on Tuesday’s Stage 16. It was a time trial, with each rider individually traveling a short but hilly course from Passy to Combloux in the Alps.

Instead it was about sustained speed on the flat, downhill and, most important, uphill sections. Pogacar hardly underperformed; he had comfortably the second-best time of the day. But Vingegaard was that much better.

“I’m the first among humans today,” said Wout van Aert, who finished in third. There was no catching Vingegaard or Pogacar on Tuesday.

This year’s event is a rare Tour de France because it has only the one time trial. A time trial is often called “the race of truth.” There are no teammates to set the pace or shadow rivals, just a rider, his bike and the clock.

Pogacar started next to last, with Vingegaard taking off two minutes later.

The first time check, at four and a half miles, after an easier part of the course, showed Vingegaard 16 seconds ahead. He stretched that to 31 seconds at the second check. At the third check, the lead was 1:05.

That was when Pogacar made a last throw of the dice, opting to change his bike for the final climb. He hopped off his time trial bike, with its aerodynamically optimized disc back wheel, and got on a standard road bike, with spokes on both wheels, more suitable for climbing. Pogacar’s U.A.E. team judged that the few seconds lost by the bike change would be compensated by time gained on the climb.

But Vingegaard was apparently not held back by sticking with his time trial bike, and the gap only lengthened.

“I was feeling great today,” he said. “I think it’s the best time trial I’ve ever done.” Asked if he expected such a significant victory, he replied: “To be honest, no. I think today I even surprised myself.”

Pogacar was philosophical but undaunted. “It’s a big gap now,” he said. “I was hoping to be in yellow today.”

“It’s definitely not over,” he added. “Especially if tomorrow is raining, then I can promise you it’s going to be interesting. Two more really hard stages to come, I think the hardest two of this Tour.” Those mountain stages come on Wednesday and Saturday before the final ceremonial stage finishing in Paris on Sunday.

During Tuesday’s stage, the odds on overall victory shifted significantly, with close to even odds for the two riders rapidly changing to Vingegaard favored over Pogacar by 10 to 1.

“It’s not easy to gain two minutes,” Pogacar acknowledged. “But we’ll try.”

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