AT A GLANCE
Why go?
The Polar Bear House (ホッキョクグマ舎, Hokkyokuguma-sha) is one of the signature animal buildings inside Higashiyama Zoo and Botanical Gardens in Nagoya's Chikusa Ward. It is home to Fubuki, a young male polar bear who has become one of the zoo's most popular attractions, and the building itself carries almost a century of history as part of the zoo's 'Arctic Panorama'.↗
Visitors come for the drama of watching a polar bear take its whole body weight into a dive, and to see how the house's white, iceberg-painted walls and moated pool have been gradually improved since a new bear arrived in 2023. On summer nights the walls are lit with projected auroras, turning the old exhibit into a glowing spectacle.
An Arctic Panorama, born in 1937
When Higashiyama Zoo opened in March 1937—then billed as the largest zoo in the East—the Polar Bear House was built alongside the Lion House as one of Japan's very first cage-free exhibits for large carnivores. Rather than bars, the bears were kept behind moats and high painted walls, so visitors could watch them as if at a distance across open ground.
The area around the house was branded the 'Arctic Panorama.' Its walls were finished in white cement to imitate arctic icebergs, and in front of them lay a pool of cold-water marine animals—seals and sea lions—so the whole quarter evoked a polar seascape. That concept still shapes the place today: the white-painted exhibit and the pool in front of it are direct descendants of that 1937 design.
