Our next stop in Nagoya: the Port Of Nagoya Public Aquarium. The Toyota Commemorative Museum was just a few stops north of Nagoya Station and pretty easy to get to. The aquarium was much further to the south, so it required us to backtrack to Nagoya Station and find trains to take us southwards. The train stop is Nagoyako Station, also the terminal and last stop for the Meiko Line. It’s an easy 4-minute walk from the station to the aquarium itself, and as the aquarium is situated facing the Port of Nagoya, there are also Japan Coast Guard ships docked nearby to see too.
We arrived at about 2PM at the aquarium, fingers crossed that there wouldn’t be huge crowds on the Friday afternoon. As it turned out, it wasn’t bad at all: there wasn’t a queue for tickets, and while there were visitors already in the aquarium, it seemed that the place that afternoon was perhaps seeing just a quarter of what should be peak crowd volume – judging from the size of the audience at the two shows we caught anyway.
The aquarium is roughly in two blocks: the North block, where the huge pools are that hold the orcas, dolphins and belugas, and also the stadium for the performances. The South block is where the thematic exhibits and tanks are. We found ourselves shuttling between the north – where we caught the Orca show and Dolphin shows at 2:30PM and 3:30PM respectively – and south blocks for the exhibits. The aquarium is also very different from the Osaka one, at least because the Nagoya one had orcas, and also animal performances.
About the latter; feelings about the treatment of animals in captivity aside, the performances are great and showcase, especially for the dolphins, their very friendly nature and acrobatic skills. One difficulty we had though was that the shows were commented on entirely in Japanese, and we couldn’t tell a lot of the time what was happening next and where we should be paying our attention and centering my lenses!
All said and done: I’ve been to quite a few aquariums now, and the New England one remains my favorite, followed closely by the Melbourne one. The Japanese ones are fairly good, and I’ll rate them in this sequence – from most favorite to least: Port of Nagoya Public Aquarium, Osaka Aquarium, and Otaru Aquarium.
That’s a wrap for today on Day 13. We got back to our hotel – The Royal Park Canvas Nagoya – just past 4:30PM to check it out, before heading out to Unimall next door (actually underground) for a very cheese-y dinner. More on that later in the post-mortem posts.
Continued in the next post!
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