Every zoo in Japan, compared

The list is the zoo half of the JAZA member roster — the Japanese Association of Zoos and Aquariums, whose members sign up to shared welfare and husbandry standards. That gives 91 zoos and animal parks, from Ueno to a squirrel garden in Machida, and leaves out roadside animal attractions that are not members. We then read each zoo's own site for the adult ticket, hours and closed days. The aquarium half of the same roster is its own table.

Two honesty notes. Where a site could not be read by machine this month (16 of them — a couple were down or moved), the row says so and carries the last published price; the table is re-checked monthly. And the "why go" column is ours; the numbers are theirs.

Search "zoos in Japan" in English and one of the suggested queries is why are Japanese zoos so bad. It deserves a straight answer, and the person writing this page is a biologist who has worked with captive and wild animals, so here it is.

The reputation comes from the older municipal zoos: concrete and steel enclosures built in the 1950s–70s, small by modern standards, sometimes still in use. That criticism is fair where it applies. What it misses is how much has changed and how uneven the picture is. Asahiyama reinvented itself around behavioural exhibits and became the model the rest of the country copied; Zoorasia, Tama, Noichi, Toyama Family Park and the rebuilt Kyoto and Morioka are landscape zoos by any standard; and the JAZA membership that defines this list carries welfare and husbandry rules that non-member roadside "zoos" do not.

A practical rule: the newer the enclosure, the better it is likely to be, and the zoos that talk about their conservation breeding — Tsushima leopard cats, rock ptarmigan, crested ibis, giant salamanders — are the ones putting money where it matters. Where an old bear pit survives, it is usually because a city zoo is free or nearly free and cannot fund a rebuild; several in this table are exactly that.

Click Adult ticket to sort by price (free ones first), filter by region, or type a name. Every zoo links to its official site — that is where today's calendar lives, and where the 16 entries we could not read by machine this month should be double-checked.

The questions people actually type, answered from the table.

Most people go to a zoo to see elephants and giraffes. If you go to a Japanese zoo to see Japan's own animals — the ones you will not meet at home and are unlikely to meet in the wild — these are the ones to know.

• Crested ibis (toki) — extinct in the wild in Japan by 2003, re-established from Chinese birds; Ishikawa Zoo is the one place the public can see them outside Sado.
• Japanese giant salamander — Hiroshima Asa Zoo has bred them since the 1970s; also at Kyoto Aquarium (see our aquarium table).
• Iriomote cat — none in any zoo; the ~100 animals are all wild on Iriomote. Do not believe a sign that says otherwise.
• Ryukyu species — Okinawa Zoo & Museum for the Amami rabbit, Ryukyu boars and native reptiles.