Port of Nagoya Public Aquarium


On my last day of winter vacation and after barely leaving my apartment for three days, I decided to take a visit to the Nagoya Aquarium and make the most of my final day of freedom. Nagoya and Aichi in general has some pretty fun and interesting places, and the aquarium happens to be my favourite because (at risk of sounding like a certain character from Ensemble Stars), I like fish. Also, it’s a great place to go in the winter when it’s cold because the majority of it is inside.

I was there from the opening at 9.30 until around 2.45. I honestly could have stayed longer and taken another look around, but I was hungry and it was so busy that the food court was full, so I left to go and get lunch. In the time I was there though I managed to see most things including catching a few of the days events. I highly recommend this place as a day out if you come to Nagoya.


The orca tank. This is the first thing you see when you walk through the entrance.

Opposite the orca tank is the beluga whale tank. I enjoyed watching these guys because for some reason they really like to swim upside down especially when they approach the glass.

I managed to watch the beluga training session. They were super cute and smart and really really liked their fish. The second picture is when they were instructed to spray water everywhere. They would spin round while doing it so it created like a water halo above their head. Other things they could do included waving to us, high-fiving the trainers, and making a lot of noise. The one in my pictures was born at the aquarium, apparently.

They have a new exhibition called “カメ、知ってる？” (“Do you know turtles?”) that will run until May 2018, and they had a whole bunch of different turtles and tortoises in there. I really like turtles so this was a great exhibition to see! These were two I managed to snap pictures of. The first one is posing nicely, but the second has his “no photos please” hand stuck out.

This is the “Tornado of Sardines”. With the way they feed them they all bunch together and make kind of a tornado shape as they eat. It really has to be seen to be fully appreciated, but it looks super cool! In the past when I’ve watched it I’ve watched it from far back but I sat right at the front today so I could see all the individual fish in there.

I took a picture of the left fish because all of the other fish in the tank were swimming around happily and this guy was just sat there looking grumpy. Then I took a picture of the right fish because he’s super ugly (I feel like these are the ones I saw on the Blue Planet documentary where the females can turn into males and the bigger the bump on their head is the more ‘handsome’ they are, but I might be mistaken).

There are so many different types of jellyfish in the world and they’re all weird and they’re all beautiful. I spent a lot of time especially watching the ones on the bottom right because they just looked like there was nothing in them. My favourite are always the Moon Jellyfish on the top though.

This was the deep sea section. It seems like the deeper in the sea you get, the weirder everything becomes. Amongst them was the ugliest fish I have ever seen in my life, and a huge crab with really long legs who turned to look at the camera the moment I pointed my phone at it.

These are Garden Eels. I love then a lot. When you first look at them they look like plants sticking up from the sand, but then you realise they have eyes and that they are actually a fish. Of course, the reason they have that name is that they look like plants.

I realised when I got partway through the place that the disadvantage of going to the aquarium alone is that I have lots of pictures of fish but no proof that I was actually there. So I decided to take a few selfies with the fish.

The tropical section is always the prettiest! There are so many different colours of fish and corals and it’s fun to watch the fish swimming in and out of the corals.

Penguins in the Antarctica area. I missed most of the feeding time because I got there too late, but I did get to see them taking away the baby penguins to weigh. Not only were they not happy about it, the other penguins would go into panic mode every time the keepers picked one up. Penguins are just so funny to watch though. The swimming penguins kept launching themselves onto land without checking if anyone was there already and would just send other penguins flying.

The last thing I did before leaving was braved the cold and watched the dolphin performance. Honestly these things are a nightmare to take pictures of because it’s hard to know when one of them is actually going to jump, but I didn’t do too badly. I got a seat really close to the platform that they had the dolphins swim onto as well. I really liked the small dolphins the best.

And with that, my last place to visit was the souvenir store. I told myself to be sensible and buy things I could use, and I generally stuck to that. There was a bit of a Garden Eel theme to my purchases, with the only thing not related being the hammerhead shark keyholder, which I bought because I really liked sharks.


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