Ueno Zoo and Shinobazu Pond Boats: What a Day in Ueno Actually Costs
Ueno Zoo costs 600 yen (the pandas left in January 2026, worth knowing first), and Shinobazu Pond boats start at 600 yen. Real prices, real visit.
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We spent a Halloween afternoon in Ueno Park, one kid in a full Luigi costume, and split the day between two things: Ueno Zoo and the paddle boats on Shinobazu Pond right next to it. Neither costs much, and together they make one of the more relaxed, low-pressure days we’ve had in Tokyo, no reservations, no timed entry, just walk up and pay at the counter.
Ueno Zoo: 600 yen, and the pandas are gone
Before anything else: if part of the appeal for you is seeing Ueno Zoo’s famous giant pandas, know that they returned to China in January 2026 and are no longer there. It’s worth saying plainly rather than letting an old blog post set the wrong expectation. The zoo’s current headline animals are a shoebill stork, Pallas’s cats, diving polar bears, elephants, gorillas, and tigers, around 300 species total across the grounds.
| Ticket | Price |
|---|---|
| Adult (high school and up) | 600 yen |
| Senior (65+) | 300 yen |
| Junior high student | 200 yen |
| Elementary age and under | Free |
Open 9:00 to 17:00, last admission 16:00 even though the grounds stay open an hour later, closed Mondays. Opened in 1882, it’s Japan’s oldest zoo, split across an East and West Garden connected by a monorail-style walkway. The East Garden is where most of the bigger animals live, the West Garden is smaller and quieter, home to the children’s zoo section where kids can get closer to smaller animals like goats and guinea pigs, a good stop to slow down at if the East Garden’s crowds have worn the kids out.
Ueno Zoo tickets
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Shinobazu Pond: boats from 600 yen
Right next to the zoo, Shinobazu Pond rents out three kinds of boats from a dockside counter, no booking ahead needed:
| Boat | Price |
|---|---|
| Rowboat | 700 yen per hour |
| Cycle (pedal) boat | 600 yen per 30 minutes |
| Swan boat | 700 yen per 30 minutes |
Open 10:00 to 18:00, closed Wednesdays between December and February. The swan boats are the ones you’ve probably seen in photos, oversized and unmistakably swan shaped, and they’re exactly as slow and wobbly to pedal as they look, which is half the fun with kids in the boat.
The free stop between the two: Bentendo Temple
The pond itself is split into three connected sections, a boating section, a cherry blossom section, and a lotus section, and where the boating and lotus sections meet sits a small island reached by a short causeway. Bentendo Temple stands on that island, dedicated to Benzaiten, the goddess of music, water, and good fortune, one of Japan’s Seven Lucky Gods. It costs nothing to walk out to it, and in summer the lotus section around it fills in almost completely with broad lotus leaves and pink blossoms, enough that the open water mostly disappears for a few months. We walked out during the same afternoon as the boats and zoo, and it added maybe fifteen minutes to the day for a genuinely different kind of stop, quiet and a little removed from the paddle boats splashing past on the other side of the causeway.
Getting there
Ueno Station sits right at the edge of the park, served by JR lines (Yamanote, Keihin-Tohoku, and more) plus the Ginza and Hibiya Metro lines, meaning there’s almost always a direct route in from wherever else you are in Tokyo that day. Both the zoo entrance and the Shinobazu Pond boat dock are a five to ten minute walk from the station, easy to do back to back without needing to plan transit in between.
Was it worth it
For the cost of two zoo tickets and one boat rental, we got a full afternoon that didn’t need advance planning, a costume that got worn twice as long as it would have anywhere else, and neither kid asked to leave early, which on a Tokyo day trip is its own kind of win. No pandas, but there’s still plenty here worth the 600 yen.
