Skip to content
Roadside Japan
🎲
Nasu Safari Park
🦊 Animals

Nasu Safari Park

📍 Tochigi, Nasu

Drive your own car through a free-range park of around 70 species — lions, tigers, giraffes, rhinos — feeding them from the window, and come back after dark for a thrilling night safari among rare white lions.

Most zoos keep you outside the cage. At Nasu Safari Park, you drive your own car straight into the enclosure and let the lions come to you. Around 70 species roam in large free-range zones — giraffes leaning toward your window, rhinos crossing the road, tigers watching from the grass.

Why It’s Interesting

The thrill is the proximity. From your car (or the caged safari bus), you can feed giraffes and even lions by hand, and the park is one of the few places in Japan to keep white lions — startlingly pale, genuinely rare animals of which only a few hundred exist worldwide. On summer weekends the night safari flips the whole experience into the dark, when the big cats prowl and the park feels wilder than anything its highland-resort setting suggests.

Best Time to Visit

Year-round by day; the night safari runs weekends roughly April to October and is the standout.

Getting There

Easiest by car (so you can do the drive-through), off the Nasu interchange; bus or taxi from Nasushiobara Station otherwise.

📸 Mon-chan's camera roll

Snapshots from our very good boy on the road.

A drive-through safari park with white lions, giraffes and a tour bus
Rare white lions, up close from a bus. Seventy species roaming free.
Mon-chan nervously watching a white lion while Cinnamon the squirrel waves from the bus window
White lions — enormous and SO fuzzy. I don't like them. We kept the windows up.

Where it is

You might also like

Nearby discoveries

Comments

  • No comments yet — be the first to share a tip.

Leave a comment

Share a tip, a correction, or what you saw. Comments are reviewed before they appear — no account needed.