Higashiyama Botanical Gardens – Joel’s Journeys & Jaunts

The full title of this attraction is “Higashiyama Zoo and Botanical Gardens,” but I stripped it down to just “Higashiyama Botanical Gardens” for the title of this post because you won’t read much about the zoo on this page.

For those who haven’t been following along, I should probably add that I’m in Nagoya, Japan.

The truth is, I didn’t want to go to the zoo. Today is Sunday. I expected it to be excruciatingly packed with families, including many children who are still at least a few years away from when they can legally be called teens. The zoo met my expectations in that regard.

When I exited the subway station close to the zoo and botanical gardens, throngs of families were streaming in the direction of the park, most with young children in tow.

Before I set out for Higashiyama, I thought the zoo and the gardens were two independent entities in the same park. They sort of are, but not in the way I hoped.

I hoped I could buy a ticket for just the botanical garden and then head to the entrance to that, while everyone who bought a ticket for the zoo would traipse off in another direction, to the zoo entrance.

That’s not how it works. I had only two ticket choices: A ticket for the Higashiyama Zoo and Botanical Gardens or a ticket for the Higashiyama Zoo, Botanical Gardens, and SkyTower. I bought the latter.

Ticket in hand, I went to the gate and handed it to the attendant. She pulled off the stub for the zoo and botanical garden, said a few Japanese words in my direction, and handed back the shortened ticket.

I went through the gate and, boom! I was in the madness of the zoo. I looked at a map. All the words on it were in Japanese. However, there were some illustrations of animals on the map, and way past them from the red text that I assume said some variation of “you are here,” there were illustrations of flowers.

I had to walk through the centre of the crammed, tumultuous zoo to get to the botanical gardens. The horror. The horror.

Just to be clear, I think that, on their own, young children are terrific and they’re some of the best people on Earth. They can be incredibly playful and cute, and they’re wonderful in groups of one or two, maybe up to three or four.

Sure, youngsters can throw tantrums at times. That’s not easy to bear or, for their parents and guardians, deal with. However, even when their temper brings out the worst in them, unlike some adults of our species, you can be reasonably confident that they won’t act out by starting a war or grabbing an assault weapon and firing on crowds.

Despite the love and respect I have for kids individually, if you pack them so tightly in an excited state that walking politely among them is worthy of the highest military honour, I tend to get a tad tense if I do indeed have to walk among them. And when I say “a tad,” I mean near terminally.

How bad was it? It was so bad that, did you see the 1967 movie “The Graduate” with Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft? Benjamin, the Dustin Hoffman character, made an audible squeaking noise when he was particularly uncomfortable.

While walking through the zoo, squirming my way through the turbulent current of teeming guttersnipes, I caught myself making that noise involuntarily. I’m not conscious of ever having made that noise before. Feeling it? Absolutely. But actually emitting a sound. Nope. I don’t think so.

I think the volume of my squeak was low enough that no one heard me among the ambient decibels, but still, I was embarrassed that it came out of me.

And before anyone pipes in, let me say that I’m not interested in hearing Mrs. Robinson jokes. I’ve never known any Mrs. Robinsons, literally or metaphorically.

(For those who are keeping score, that’s the second film reference I made in this entry. I didn’t call out the first one.)

But it wasn’t just the crowds of families that unnerved me. Because I had to walk through the zoo, I saw some of the animals. One I saw, a hippopotamus, had a decent-sized enclosure—not as large as at some modern zoos, and without making much of an attempt to replicate its natural habitat—but, still, it didn’t seem overly cramped.

However, some animals I passed were in cramped cages. Literal cages. I didn’t look at the signs, but I think some were small primates. That’s not the sort of zoo I want to spend any time in. I was eager to get out of the zoo portion of Higashiyama Park as fast as I could.

Eventually, after following the scant directional signs I found pointing to the botanical gardens, I came to …

A park exit.

I found an attendant and was able to communicate that I was looking for the botanical gardens. He responded in stilted English that it was across the street, and he gave me a reentry ticket to get in the gate there.

So, I could have gotten into the gardens without going through the zoo if I followed the road that runs along the side of the zoo and then makes a turn to cross between the zoo and the gardens. That’s a good thing because I made a promise to myself that if I ever got to Higashiyama Botanical Gardens, I wouldn’t go back through the zoo even if I had to cut a hole in the fence.

Huh, I wrote a heck of a lot about the zoo after saying you wouldn’t read much about the zoo here, didn’t I? Nevertheless, I still refuse to include it in the title of this entry.

The Higashiyama Botanical Gardens, Finally

The Higashiyama Botanical Gardens were a joy and blissful compared to the zoo. The crowds were smaller by at least an order of magnitude and probably a few orders of magnitude. And even within that smaller attendance, I think the ratio of children was lower, too. Furthermore, the children who were there were less frenzied than the kids at the zoo.

Oh, joy. Oh, bliss.

The Higashiyama Botanical Gardens has a few sections: greenhouses, a flower garden, a separate rose garden, a rhododendron forest, a bamboo grove, a lily pond, and probably a few other sections I’ve forgotten. In addition, there are lots of forested areas. It’s quite beautiful.

The greenhouses housed lush tropical plants.

The lily pond contained two types of lilies. I don’t know what one was, but the other was the Victoria lily. The first time I recall seeing a Victoria lily was on one of the trips catalogued in the journal. I didn’t start writing this crap until I’d already moved into my decrepitude stage of life. So that’s a lot of years during which I don’t think I’d seen any. Since then, I’ve seen them at a number of botanical gardens I’ve visited on my trips. They’re still an astounding lily species, but I’m becoming jaded.

There are two decent-sized hills in Higashiyama Botanical Gardens. The flower garden is at the top of one of them. I walked up.

The flower garden was a little bit sparse, probably because of the time of year. Nevertheless, there were a surprising number of flowers that were still in full bloom in the second half of November. Having said that, it’s probably surprising only to those of us who normally live in a location with weather that meteorologists, in that scrupulously scientific way they have, call unfreaking bearable. Of course, that’s only the genteel meteorologists. The crasser of them might use other words.

The Higashiyama Botanical Gardens contain a wide variety of trees. Some species have leaves with less staying power than others. At the top of the hill with the flower garden, there were some trees whose leaves were well past their prime. They were a dry, rusty brown colour and were falling off the trees; many had already fallen off. I sat on a bench among them and had leaves falling on my head, which I think is a better experience than having raindrops keep falling on my head.

(Three.)

There are a couple of raised observation decks on the top of that hill. They provided great views of the lower reaches of the Higashiyama Botanical Gardens and of downtown Nagoya off in the distance.

Trees elsewhere in the garden ranged from still verdant green to flaming red, vibrant orange, and brilliant yellow. I think those are the official names of the colours. If not, I’m claiming copyright on them, and you have to pay me if you use them.

A sign near the start of the rhododendron forest said, in both Japanese and English, that they are at their best in April. It’s, as I said, now the second half of November. It looked like an ordinary forest. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

By the time I thought I’d seen everything there is to see in the Higashiyama Botanical Gardens, morning was already over. I was going to go to the other attraction covered by the combination ticket I bought, the SkyTower. But, because it was already afternoon, I’ll save my narrative on that until my afternoon post.

Oh, by way of a teaser, I should say that the route to the SkyTower showed me that I hadn’t seen everything there was to the botanical gardens. So, you’re going to want to come back and read that post.