Asa Zoo

This guide to Asa Zoo in Hiroshima opens with a four-hundred-year-old legend from a river near Okayama: a ten-meter man-eating monster, a young man named Hikoshiro who dove in after it, and a shrine villagers built to appease its ghost. It then brings you to the Reptile House here to meet the real animal behind that story, a giant salamander that moves like a wet log and eats about one small fish a week. This zoo has bred them since 1979, including a female named Igaguri, who was born here in 1980.