Sapporo City Maruyama Zoo — Attraction in Sapporo

our daughter was very happy as she got to see several unique animals. especially the snow leopard, which she had been dying to see for a while.

other highlights were the red pandas and the pretty awesome polar bear exhibit. the latter is an all-glass tunnel under the polar beal pool, which allows for super up-close views of the two polar bears swimming under water (which is an amazing sight).

overall, the zoo itself is very small, and as many have observed, most of the enclosures are relatively tiny, especially for the larger animals, which really isn't great. it does make it easy to cover the whole zoo relatively quickly, though.

generally speaking, i don't like the concept of animals being caged, far from their natural habitat, with, especially for the larger animals, no real company. i do understand that some zoos participate in wildlife conservation efforts which somewhat ameliorates these concerns.

the maruyama zoo, with its tiny enclosures, definitely makes this a much larger concern.

however, the upside is that you will be able to see the animals up close and personal. seeing a snow leopard yawn and bare its fangs a few feet away, a tiger pacing around its enclosure, a red panda climbing a tree just a little distance away, all of this was pretty amazing.

our first attempt at visiting the zoo found a zoo that was closed. which was pretty annoying. the city maintains a english page for the zoo (which is appreciated), but the calendar itself is all in japanese and chrome wasn't translating the page. it would be great if the city also supported english in the calendar.

for reference, here is the calendar schedule (but i don't know if there are other random days of closure).

calendar:

From March 1st to October 31st From 9:30 to 16:30 (last entrance at 16 o'clock) From November 1 to the end of February From 9:30 to 16:00 (last entry 15:30)

Closed days Second and fourth Wednesday of every month (next day in the case of holiday) Monday - Friday of that week, including the second Wednesday of April Monday through Friday of that week, including the second Wednesday in November December 29 - 31 luckily, we tried again the next day and the...

I went despite the negative reviews. I thought “this is Japan, surely people are exaggerating and the animals are taken care of properly.” I was so wrong. Firstly they wouldn’t recognize my disability certificate because it’s “not a certificate from Japan”. Every other place I had been to so far had recognized it, but not this place.

Nearly a quarter of the exhibits were empty because the animals had died. The big mammals had enclosures that were way too small, they were pacing back and forth looking depressed and miserable.

Japanese people would point at an animal that clearly looks depressed and dirty and they’d go “kawaiiii!!” and move on to the next depressed animal. I don’t know how they don’t realize that the animal is suffering and that the cages are way too small, it seems like the animal’s cuteness is all that matters to them. It felt so dystopian.

On top of that the food is extremely overpriced and there were easily 100 screaming children in the zoo all day long… I thought Japanese people hated when people can’t control their kids, but that’s all that this was: kids out of control all over the zoo.

Avoid this place, save your...

Honestly loved this zoo, it was really fun. The zoo is quite large. Though not the biggest I've been to, it still allows you to walk out satisfied. Entrance fees were rather cheap, kids go in for free whilst adults pay around 600 yen each. I found it a bit low so I bought some food/souvenirs to help it out even a tiny bit. Food was quite good, especially liked the doughnuts/churros! As for the animals, we were specifically looking for the red pandas. They were really cute and quite active. There's an indoor area for the red pandas where they are literally walking over your heads. Other animal exhibits that were interesting are the polar bears, monkeys, birds, otters, tigers, snow leopards etc. The petting zoo (aka children's zoo) wasn't much as you could really only pet the sheep, but other animals you could look at are the guinea pigs, beavers, prairie dogs, raccoon dogs, hare, squirrels etc. I overall really enjoyed it there, it was quite clean and though the habitats for the animals weren't the largest, they weren't the...