Land of the Rising Sun, 2016

Enjoying this thread a lot...looking forward to more! These trip threads are always interesting.

 

Sorry everybody. I've been quite unwell more or less ever since I got home from Japan, and writing - or at least, writing well - has been somewhat beyond me. But I don't want memories to grow even dimmer, so I will try to write something about each place I visited even if it's somewhat cursory. I'm not going to do a big long walk-through post, as I am not likely to finish the post or ever start the next one if I try. So I will instead do something short and attempt to answer questions if people have any.

I knew Zoorasia was going to be a highlight of the trip. I remember talking to Chlidonias about the best zoos in Asia, and positing the view that Singapore was the undisputed leader. Probably, he agreed, but he wouldn't make such firm statements without visiting Yokohama first. That's a fair call, because I'm leaning towards giving the title to Zoorasia on points.

It's not a huge zoo and I only spent about 3.5 hours there, despite covering some territory twice. It was, however, quite a bit larger than I expected because the English-language map I had been looking at before the trip was out of date and didn't include the very new African Savannah complex.

It's very much an ABC zoo, with few birds and almost no reptiles, but with virtually all the big name mammals. It's not a place to go for rarities, really. Unless, say, proboscis monkeys, douc langurs and Tsushima leopard cats are your thing. I regret that I didn't manage to see the leopard cat, though I saw virtually everything else.

If Ueno takes after the European city zoo tradition, then Zoorasia has American heritage. The enclosures are mostly large, mostly lushly planted and almost uniformly beautiful. It's an 'immersion' zoo, and a pretty damn effective one. There's a seamless transition between two geographic zones - tropical Asia and nearctic North America - that's accomplished by passing through a short man-made tunnel. On one side you're in a rainforest, and on the other the vegetation has completely changed. Very nicely done.

There are a couple of uninspiring exhibits in the tropical Asian zone - seemingly the oldest part of the zoo - for elephants and orang-utans. Some of the primate exhibits nearby, including for the doucs, are showing their age (though they are very spacious and more than satisfying for their inhabitants. And it was at Zoorasia that I decided the Japanese government must mandate that Japanese macaques be held on concrete 'mountains'.

The rest of the zoo is uniformly fantastic. The walk-through aviary had a weird mix of species - I haven't written down notes but I know there were crowned pigeons, Mandarin ducks and, of all things, a small kestrel species (I'm sorry, I forget which). The sea lions, polar bears and penguins all had gorgeous, spacious pools with turbulent water (a small touch, but always one that creates a far more enriching environment). I loved the wildly overgrown island for chimps - I saw nine but there could easily have been twice that number.

The African Savannah had the biggest surprise in store, with a mixed-species paddock for giraffes, zebras, eland and... cheetahs! The cat I saw in there at the time (there was another in a separate, adjacent enclosure) was reclining within a small boma constructed out of fallen trees, and I suspect they are more determined to stay out of the hoof stock's way than the reverse. Still, it was a fascinating mix to see.

Like Tama, Zoorasia is on a hilly site, but they've approached the challenge very differently and, to my mind, successfully. There's a long valley through the middle of the zoo, and the exhibits are all strung out along the ridge around it. Some of the lowland area has been turned into a farm exhibit with pony rides, some has been turned into a picnic ground and yet more has been reserved as established woodland. I went for a stroll through this bit, which turned into a mad dash when I came across an enormous, terrifying, Japanese hornet. I fled for my life, leaving my dignity somewhere in the forest.

I've been to a decent handful of leading zoos now - Singapore, Taronga, Melbourne, Adelaide, Washington, Bronx and both San Diegos. I'd rank Zoorasia ahead of most of them. Don't even think of missing it if you're ever in Japan.

 

Sadly I miss it.I know it was a good zoo but I don't have enough time.

 

I really liked Zoorasia but I wouldn't have even considered putting it ahead of Singapore (the only leading zoo you list that I've been to). Perhaps part of the issue was visiting in winter when many animals were indoors and things didn't look their best? I wasn't a fan of many of the enclosures, but like you I found some (like the chimpanzees and main Savannah) to be absolutely amazing.

In the walkthrough when I visited a Japanese sparrowhawk was labelled but I couldn't find it at all. Did you manage to see any birds of prey inside?

 

After Zoorasia it was time to branch out beyond the Tokyo area. Next stop: Nagoya.

I actually stayed two nights in Nagoya, thinking that I would visit the Port of Nagoya Aquarium and the Japan Monkey Centre. The Higashiyama Zoo has a reputation for having lots of rare species, but the photos I'd seen also left me thinking it might be a contender for worst major urban zoo in the developed world, so I never seriously contemplated visiting. I like to see new species, but there are limits to the conditions I will validate in order to do so.

I also changed my mind about the Japan Monkey Centre at the last minute. We shall have to wait for an epistle from another Visitor to Japan to find out if I made the right choice.

If I had my time again I wouldn't have stayed in Nagoya at all - whilst I understood in theoretical terms how high speed rail could make the distance between major cities fall away into meaninglessness, I didn't grasp it in practice. I'd recommend that people travelling between Tokyo and Osaka or Kyoto on a JR Pass treat Nagoya as a day stop to see the Aquarium, and only stay the night if they intend to add the collections I mentioned above. But we live and learn.

The upshot of all this is that I had an abundance of time at Port of Nagoya. And... It's a strange sort of place.

Whilst it's in a completely different city to Tokyo it's really in the exact same place as the Tokyo Sea Life Park; an old harbour side that once considered turning to tourism when ships grew too big for it, but then decided to have a nice long nap instead. Like Tokyo, an enormous observation wheel looms over the area, but if moved at all it was waiting until my back was turned. The Aquarium was presumably bringing people to the area, but not very many on the day I visited.

The Aquarium is divided into two halves across two separate buildings connected by a long corridor. I presume this is the result of a major expansion at some point in the past, but I don't know the history. Broadly speaking, the North Building has the mammals, the South Building hosts the rest.

The mammal collection feels rather like a Japanese franchise of Sea World; orcas, belugas , dolphins (bottle nose and I think Pacific white-sided) and seals (harbor? Common? I forget). You walk into the underwater viewing space and can take an escalator to an outdoor viewing area at the top. My first impression was favourable; a very large show pool, with indoor viewing underneath a grandstand outside, where about 16 dolphins of both species were swimming. I at first assumed they were in there in preparation for a show. Separate viewing windows looked into a smaller pool with orcas (3) and a deep, cylindrical space for the two seals. Belugas (3) have a separate pool in a second room off to the side. Also in this section is an extensive set of interpretative exhibits of cetaceans.

Soon after I arrived I learned there was to be an orca show, and it boasted that there would also be live video of said show on the big screen over the main pool. I didn't think too much of that - I'd be sitting in the grandstand watching the show itself, so I wasn't sure why the video was so significant. But I understood when I sat down to watch and found that the orcas weren't leaving their smaller complex behind the main pool, and the dolphins weren't moving around either; the orca session was happening in their (permanent) pool, which has only got space for maybe 30 visitors to watch directly, so the grandstand was proving overflow space. Nagoya might be the only major aquarium in the world to advertise that you can watch animal shows on a big screen.

More wandering about outside (or more accurately, the roof of North Building) made me a little less satisfied with the mammal exhibits overall. You can also view the belugas at surface level (though under a roof, which is a good thing in Summer), where I found that a genuinely tiny off-show pool was home to a fourth beluga. I hope it's not a full-time arrangement. On the other hand, I watched a training session which was long and detailed, and that hopefully keeps the whales' minds ticking over. The same underlying dynamic: scant space, extensive interaction - seems to be reflected with the orcas, although they *did* have full access to all three small pools in their complex. There's also a second, shallow pool with another 4 or 5 dolphins (no underwater viewing) and the top of the seal exhibit up here. The latter benefits immensely from the depth but has little horizontal swimming space, so it's a mixed bag.

Now, try to imagine you're in a provincial community centre built in the 1970s, whose services have slowly been ebbing away due to budget cuts ever since, leaving a not-quite-neglected, not-quite-loved, mostly empty space behind to gently put the long-gone city officials back in their place. That's what the South Building of Port of Nagoya Aquarium reminds me of.

Tiled walls. An atrium with plant boxes at the bottom. Empty corridors. Great big rooms with one or two tanks, old carpet and bare walls. At one point I walked down a corridor to find a cordoned off area that may once have held a series of small tanks; all but one was empty and it had a panther grouper. Why was it there? Well, why not?

The entire thing is set across several floors, and as I said the quality is pretty good where it counts. There are three gorgeous coral reef tanks, the biggest of which is separated by an artificial reef from a fairly standard feature saltwater tank. There are unremarkable, but perfectly decent jellyfish and Australian freshwater exhibits. There's a big, SeaWorld-style Antarctic penguin exhibit that gave me my second (but first good) look at emperor penguins, and a reasonably-sized circular tank that had a good dozen or so sea turtles of different species.

The absolute highlight was the 'Karoshio' tank, featuring schooling silver fish (sardines? Mackerel? I'll call them "SSFs"), a small hammerhead shark and a dolphin fish. The two large predators were making half-hearted attempts to catch the fish, and the resulting manoeuvres were mesmerising to watch. Schooling tanks are a ubiquitous feature of Japanese aquaria, but the size of and predators in this one make it the best.

There are lowlights too, of course. For reasons that escape me, one room contains a projector showing a wildlife documentary and a completely inadequate, plastic rodent cage holding a sugar glider. The worst, though, was actually in a third building outside. The "Chelonian Research Institute" presumably does carry out research, but from a visitor's perspective it's a grand name for a series of bathtub-sized pens for sea turtles of various ages. Truly terrible.

Adding to the quirkiness of the place are a series of smaller exhibits, which bear the hallmarks of an unusually creative curator in Nagoya's past. There are interactive tanks - one that allows people to control the lighting in a tank and a more novel one where you turn a wheel that switches and strengthens the current in the tank - it's fascinating to watch the fish respond to the shifting water flow. But creativity blurs into weirdness in the deep sea exhibits, which don't feature deep sea fish like in most other Japanese aquaria: they've gone for holograms of deep sea fish instead. Yes, holograms.

Port of Nagoya is, to put it bluntly, a weird place. The quality is patchy overall, and it's hard to escape the feeling that its best days are somewhere behind it. But it's certainly interesting, and is very doable as a day trip from either Tokyo or Osaka. Put it on your list if you have time for any more than 3 or 4 Japanese collections.

 

I think the season would make a big difference. Singapore has it covered for depth but I think the overall quality is higher at Zoorasia. So it depends what you emphasise.

Nope.

 

I enjoyed it well enough, though I don't think it's world-class.

 

After a couple of days wandering around Kyoto, I ventured into Osaka to visit the Tennoji Zoo.

Unfortunately, this will be a *very* surface-level post, because just as I arrived at the zoo the heavens opened. The rain was so torrential that, after trying and failing to wait it out in the reptile house, I fled back to the entrance, paid too much money for a locker and left my camera and phone safe and dry inside. The result is that I have neither photos nor notes to draw from: I wish I'd written this on the day but I didn't get to it, and I will have to write from memory with the help only of the map. Oh well.

I wasn't sure what to expect of Tennoji. What little I knew of it was that it was of a similar vintage to Ueno, but that it was perhaps a little behind on quality. I hoped that it would surprise me on the upside as Ueno had... and it did, until it didn't.

My visit didn't get off to the happiest of starts, given the gathering cyclone overhead. I was also unsettled by passing a restaurant, near the zoo, where three soft shell turtles were sitting in a small fish tank outside, clearly waiting to be cooked fresh for a customer. I try to be a non-judgmental vegetarian and an even less judgmental tourist, but, well, I just didn't like seeing it. Hopefully they were captive bred for meat and humanely killed, but who knows.

The reptile house is perfectly decent, though unremarkable. The one big surprise was a hawksbill turtle! It was in too-small a tank that had a sizeable land area, so I suspect it previously held crocodiles or alligators. I've never seen a sea turtle at a zoo - as opposed to aquarium - before and whilst I don't think the housing for this one was adequate it'd be great to see them in more reptile houses.

I'd hoped to wait out the rain inside but, as it turned out, I had instead deprived myself of the relatively driest part of the morning. Nevertheless, I was in Osaka, a long way from home, so I persevered and headed into the African-themed portion of the zoo. To an extent it's a postage stamp collection here - I remember one hippo, one black rhino and I think only one hyena - and the exhibits for carnivores are on the small side, but they are well presented and I saw signs of an active enrichment program. Had the entire zoo been of the same quality I would have been well pleased.

But it's a long way away from that. There were a couple of bright spots to follow, but as the rain turned into Noah's flood it's fair to say my perseverance went unrewarded. A series of enclosures for carnivores - jaguars, Japanese wolves and a tiger - consisted of concrete cells with glass fronts. When I say 'cells' I use the term advisedly. They had bare concrete floors and zero furnishings. There was nothing for the animals to do. Nothing.

An acceptable, if ugly outdoor enclosure for penguins (Humboldts or Africans I think) conceals an indoor exhibit behind it for half a dozen king penguins. Their enclosure consists of a concrete room with a narrow rectangle of water. Again, nothing to do. Nothing. A row of concrete and bar cages hold a series of large monkey species, most of them on their own. A male mandrill, a male drill, various macaques: they could climb up and down the walls of the cages and scream at each other. That's it.

It's not all bad. The elephant enclosure was perhaps the best I saw in Japan, though that's not a major achievement. The koala complex was better than Tama's all-indoors effort, with nice outdoor yards. The chimp exhibit was not a touch on Zoorasia, but continued the surprising, welcome trend of great apes doing much better in Japanese zoos than I expected. There was an orang-utan complex with two lushly-planted, fully-enclosed large cages. A sign said the orang-Utah had died; they should not get another one and use the facilities for the mandrill and drill instead.

I did get one very important lifetime first at Tennoji: my first clear look at a kiwi. I'd seen a brown ball at Bronx and not even that at Washington, but it's hard to have such failures in the Tennoji nocturnal house, as the kiwi's exhibit provides very little cover and is actually relatively well-lit. Even more unfortunately, there was no staff member or even signs reminding people to be quiet. I'd hate to be that kiwi when a school group comes in. Whilst I was happy to see a kiwi for the first time, I do wish it had been in better circumstances. There was perhaps a dozen or so enclosures in the nocturnal house, but I don't remember anything else that wasn't also kept in equal or better conditions at Ueno.

I finished my visit with a quick walk through the aviary. Have a look at the map. The aviary is marked to scale. It's massive: possibly even bigger than the Waterfall Aviary at Jurong. It holds a variety of Japanese wading birds and water fowl, and whilst it's nicely planted it's a bit of a waste, since many of the same species housed inside can be seen perched directly outside.

By the time I'd been through the aviary the rain had eased back to no more than a solid drenching. I weighed sticking around in the hope that it would clear further, but decided not to. I'll forgive a lot if I can see signs a zoo is grappling with its past, like I did at Ueno and Tama. But there were too many enclosures at Tennoji where the animals should either be found new homes or humanely euthanised, and that's not something I say lightly. Combine it with the rain and I was done with Tennoji for one day.

 

Luckily for me, Tennoji wasn't my only stop on my day trip to Osaka. I had deliberately visited the zoo ahead of Osaka Aquarium (Kaiyukan) because I wanted a personal milestone - my 50th zoo or aquarium - to be a heavyweight. And it delivered in spades.

50 might not sound like a lot to many on here, but it's required a lot of work. I can count the zoos nearby on one hand, of which I've been to all but one that's of interest (the seemingly perpetually-postponed Moonlit Sanctuary. I'm hoping for December when my partner and I both have our student obligations out of the way for the semester. My resolve may seem weak, MRJ, but it is there).

To reach my half-century has required travel to four countries and what must by now be well over 60,000 kilometres. So please don't mind if I raise my bat towards the member's stand. My innings started very slowly - it took well over a decade into my adult years to reach 29, but I feel I've finally settled at the crease and a maiden century is in my sights.

The rain had eased, though not cleared, by the time I made my way to the harbour area, which has the by-now-fully-anticipated giant Ferris wheel, but which lacks the feeling of genteel abandonment of its equivalents in Tokyo and Nagoya.

The aquarium building looks vaguely like a giant LEGO brick with wings. After entering you walk through a fairly mundane tunnel tank for reef fishes and ascend an escalator, from which point more or less the entire experience is downhill. This is wonderful for mobility-restricted visitors; this is one of the very few places where I feel I could take my partially-disabled father without the pain of walking being too much for him.

The next exhibit is effectively on the roof of the main structure, and consists of a domed rainforest hall. It's small and not overly significant, consisting of a couple of open-topped tanks for Japanese fish and an overhead view of the small-clawed otter tank. But its best feature is very cool indeed; a moist cave wall with small orange crabs at all levels, that wraps around the staircase down into the lower level. I confess I can't find the species name now - maybe another visitor can help me out?

From here we are into the main structure of the aquarium. I'm not going to go into massive detail or try to describe everything. To try to go exhibit by exhibit, I fear, would be to not do it justice. For a fuller overview of the exhibits on show check out the website.

The unifying theme is the Pacific Rim; the Ring of Fire. As well as representing species from the various oceanographic zones of the Pacific, the design of the aquarium represents this theme as well. Now, I'm sure most of us here have at least seen a picture of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and how it has galleries that wrap around a central atrium? If not look at it on Google Images.

Imagine, if you will, that somebody filled that atrium with water. That's now the central, oceanic tank that houses the whale shark and various other pelagic fish and elasmobranch species. And arrayed on the outer side of the walkways, where the art is hung, lie the themed tanks for each region. The layout of the aquarium imitates that of of the Pacific itself; an oceanic expanse surrounded by diverse seas on all sides.

Does that sound good? What if I told you that in all there were perhaps only 10 or 15 of these habitat tanks? Would you be disappointed? Well then, what if I said that most of them are three stories deep, and that as you descend further down into the building you keep returning to the same tank three, maybe four times, but with a completely different perspective? At one level you get a surface level view of the seals and sea lions, then a mid-level view, and then you see them foraging around the bottom of the perhaps 8-10m deep pool, all the time at eye level? Or that you go from a similarly surface-level view of the Great Barrier Reef to the tank floor, where not only the light level changes but so do the species preferring those depths?

Nowhere have I seen a facility extract so much value from a relatively limited number of exhibits. Georgia Aquarium had more going on, and bigger exhibits overall, but it felt undercooked. Osaka is the mega-aquarium done to near-perfection. I say 'near' because the size of a couple of tanks could be more generous for the biggest species, notably the whale shark, but I don't think I saw anything that was patently unsuitable, and this is the only time I can make that statement about a Japanese collection.

I've seen tanks presented over multiple levels before. So have we all. But I haven't seen it done better than here. Even the small-clawed otter underwater viewing offered a feast for the eyes: there's a massive shoal of fish in there for the otters to hunt, and each time they enter the water fish shoot in myriad directions. I've never spent more time watching otters.

The signage, too, leverages the depth of the tanks; I noticed that as you descend down the main tank, which I think is visible across about seven levels, the species signs change to reflect which animals are most likely to be seen from that vantage point. At the top it's the whale shark, at the bottom it's the wobbegongs.

Apart from the main complex there are a couple of other small sections. The final portion of the aquarium is less strong, but still pretty good. It consists of a pool for ringed seals that seems pretty small, but has the nice feature for visitors of not being fully enclosed - you can walk into an alcove off the main walkway and feel the air temperature of the exhibit. I don't recommend it if you're wearing a still-soaked t-shirt after walking through a Summer downpour! The other two exhibits here are a large touch pool for benthic sharks and rays and a 'Maldives' tank with a few tropical reef fish.

A temporary exhibit in a small room off the deep sea section made me laugh out loud. My visit coincided with the release of Finding Dory, and whilst the Kaiyukan clearly didn't have any licensing arrangement with Disney they weren't going to let that stop them from cashing in.

The graphics on the walls are, shall we say, of a very familiar design. There's a fish tank that's a direct facsimile of the one to be found at 42 Wallaby Way, Sydney. A tank with blue tangs explains that "in an animated film a regal blue tang appears as a talkative, yet forgetful character". Another tank for clownfish says that "clownfish are now better known by the name of a character from an animated film." It's delightfully shameless.

I still have quite a few of the heavy hitters of the aquarium world to go: Monterey Bay, Shedd, Churaumi, Valencia and Lisbon are the big ones that come to mind. They're going to have to be good to knock Osaka out of the gold medal position.

 

Thanks for the fantastic review of Osaka Aquarium and the facility certainly seems like a must-visit for any zoo enthusiast. Congratulations on hitting your 50th zoo and I appreciated the cricket lingo.

 

It really does sound incredible! Thanks for the write up.

 

No glass, but yes there is a waterfall. The latter entirely slipped my memory, which is clearly not very good.

 

Seems as a very awesome aquarium! Just asking, do you visit Toba Aquarium? It is very good too and is near Osaka

 

Are you sure? As far as I know, (except for cryptid sightings), the Japanese wolf is no more...

 

Then no, I'm not sure. As I stated in that post the rain was so heavy that I had neither my phone or camera, so I'm going completely off memory. I probably saw a sign that mentioned Japanese wolves or something.

 

Not on this trip, alas.