According to the online dinosaur museum website there are nearly 1000 dinosaur related places in Japan with the vast majority of them being parks and playgrounds. I thought I’d visited a fair few but it seems that I’ve barely scratched the surface!

To be fair, I have visited some of the major ones as many listed on the aforementioned site (be warned about visiting that site as it is a typical out-of-date Japanese one that is overly cluttered and anything but a smooth read!) are just very small and basic playground structures. However, when I heard that there was a park in one of Tokyo’s nearby prefecture with some sizeable dinosaurs I was keen to visit.

Given that its location was in Ibaraki Prefecture I wasn’t so up for going all that way just to see a few dinosaur structures. However, when I knew I was going to be in Omiya for a football match I decided to go a few hours earlier and do a detour to see this park. For the record, it then took 35 minutes on the Tobu Urban Park line from there to Atago station followed by a half hour bus ride to the park. There was then a short walk so this place sure did take a fair bit of effort to get there.

Yasaka Park is a typical community park (gardens, sports facilities, wildlife areas, open grassy areas etc.) but eventually I stepped back into time and was surrounded by the life-size prehistoric creatures in the forest of fallen dinosaurs.

This Jurassic era space has been open since the mid 1980s when there was supposedly something of a dinosaur boom in Japan. Dinosaurs make for popular playground apparatus for a few reasons. Kids simply just love them. They can occasionally be academic and perhaps most importantly they are not subject to the same trademark registrations that monsters are.

The first one I encountered was the T-Rex whose body can be entered via steps but be aware that the space inside for getting to the head is incredibly tight.

The Triceratops has no built-in play features so either it’s for the accomplished climbers or just to be admired from ground level.

A Brontosaurus (I think!) has a small slide coming out of its rear following entry through the chest.

The fourth and final dinosaur is a dimetrodon where you can rest or shelter and see through the mouth once inside.

Seeing those dinosaurs should’ve been my adventure for the day but sadly that wasn’t the case as there was a twist in the “tail” when trying to get back to Omiya to see Bayern Munich in action at 5:00 pm. With a bit of time to kill I thought I’d just go and wait near the bus stop for the half hour before it was expected. However, it just never came and the other lady waiting at the bus stop was bemused too. She was a local resident but not Japanese either.

The heat was absolutely boiling on this late July afternoon and we just assumed the original bus wasn’t coming but the next one an hour later would. We were waiting outside a local shop, and the owners must’ve noticed us standing there for ages and came out to see what was going on.

They looked at the bus timetable and alerted us to an extra message which had bypassed us saying that buses were being rerouted on this weekend. I then realised that on the way to the park I had taken a brief look at Google Maps and did notice the bus was taking a slightly different route to what I was expecting but never really thought anything of it! Big mistake as I wasted nearly two hours waiting for nothing!

Was it worth going all that way to see just four dinosaurs? Probably not. Am I glad I went? Yes. The bus adventure added an extra layer to the day and made it a more memorable trip.

Click here to read ‘TF Top 10……Must-See Dinosaur-Related Places in Japan’

Click here to read ‘The Tokyo Templed Guarded By A Pre-Historic Creature!’

Click here to read ‘Very Few Parks Will Tricera-Top This One n Tokyo!’

Click here to read ‘Tokyo Daytripper: Top 10 Ibaraki Sights’

Click here to read ‘These Unique Coloured Torii Gates Are a Sweet Sight!’