Yoyogi Park Dog Run is a great place to take your dog to run off leash. Located in the centre of Tokyo it’s an amazing place. Not only is there the dog run, but the park is huge and you can walk around with your dog on leash as well through here.
Registration
Before being allowed into the dog run, you must register your dog at the park office. This is located next to the parking area. We got the metro and it’s closest to Yoyogi-koen station only a couple of minutes walk. It took about an hour in total on the train, but it’s worth it once you get there.
To register you need to bring your rabies vaccine certificate. Only the original is accepted. We also had to show our registration tag from the local ward as we are living here. I think if you are on holiday you can explain this and it should be fine. We filled in a basic form (they have an English version too) with name, rabies vaccine date and humans details and that was it. After that, we were given a pass to use the park which you must wear when using the park at all times. Dogs aren’t allowed inside the office so I waited outside whilst I was being registered.
We were also given a list of rules to follow which are pretty basic also.
Dog Run
There are 3 different dog runs, all right next to each other. The first is for dogs under 5kg, the second for dogs under 12kg and the third for dogs over 12kg. As the weight increases, the size of the run increases too, so the bigger dogs have a much bigger space to run in. We did see some smaller dogs using the bigger run so I guess it’s up to owners discretion.
Upon entering the dog run we didn’t have to show our pass to anyone and there didn’t seem to be any staff checking anything. However, like most things in Japan it seems that people are just trusted to follow the rules and we didn’t see any signs of rule breaking. We went into the middle sized one for dogs up to 12kg.
It has to be the most well looked after and picturesque dog runs I’ve ever been too. Usually there’s dog poop everywhere, poorly looked after and usually in not so nice areas. There was no dog poop to be seen in this one, and they even had sakura trees in the middle! When we were visiting they were blooming too so it was beautiful!
All of the dogs were well behaved and I had a great time running around. After I was done we then went for a walk around Yoyogi park itself to see more of the sakura. We grabbed some food to eat under the trees next to the lake and relaxed for a couple of hours. We got lucky with the weather as it was lovely and sunny and warm so we could enjoy all day. Look how pretty it was;
Conclusion
Hopefully I’ll get to come back here a lot more in the future and maybe I will meet one of you there one day. To get around the park once I was tired I used my trusty K9 Sports Sack which seemed to get a lot of attention!
Let me know if you know of any other dog parks in Tokyo as I’d love to try more out. You can also check out some other pet friendly places in Tokyo that I found here.
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Woof woof, Wylie x
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