Kodomonokuni (Children's Land)

Sarah and I found a wonderful children's park outside of Yokohama called Kodomonokuni or "Children's Land" in English. This brings up an interesting point, so please bear with me a moment -- the link I provided above takes you Wikipedia, specifically to a web-page about the train line supporting the park, because that is the best site I could find on the park in English.

Here is the official website for Kodomonokuni. Note that it is in Japanese. I have been studying Japanese for several months now, and I still can't make heads or tails of it. Fortunately the good folks at Google have an automated translation service: Same URL, but now in English. It might not be perfect, but it's a heck of a lot better than nothing. Station names make some of the most interesting reading, because they tend be literally translated.
We live near "black eye" (Meguro) station, just down the line from "bitter valley" (Shibuya) station.

Kodomonokuni is a very large park by Japanese standards: 240 acres. It was originally a Japanese military storage area, continued as a military facility administered by the US following WWII, and was finally repurposed into a children's park in the mid-sixties.

There are facilities for children of various ages, but we focused on the "farm" area. It contains a large petting zoo, as well as a functioning dairy. They also had pony rides which Robbie and Sarah availed themselves of. And at the end of a very hot day, we were able to cool down a bit by purchasing ice-cream cones made with milk from the park's own cows.

Here are photos from our first visit:





In fact, we enjoyed our first trip so much that we invited our friends Andrew, Deb, and their son Josiah along with us for a second trip a few weeks later. Unfortunately it rained that day, so we more-or-less had the park to ourselves. The petting zoo was not open, but we were still able to see many of the animals from a distance. The squat little goats, for instance, were lined up head to tail at the edge of their enclosure under a 6" overhang, trying to stay out of the rain.

The sheep and cows came down to their fence to visit with us, even though we had no food for them, and we were able to see the prairie dogs, raccoons, geese, chickens, ducks, chipmunks, donkeys, pigs, etc., through a fence, as usual. Two of the main attractions however, were not available: guinea-pig and rabbit holding, and the pony rides. That settles it. I guess we will have to go back.

Here is a picture from our second trip, along with a movie: