Although educating the public about conservation has been declared as a main aim of zoos, there has been much discussion on how efficient zoos are at doing this. Balmford et al (2004) examined the impact of UK zoo education on the visiting public rather than focusing on particular exhibits. This study applies their questionnaire and methods to Japanese zoo's, and examines the effectiveness of Japanese zoosat changing visitor's conservation awareness. In addition to the visitor survey, this study also assesses Japanese zoo administration to understand current zoo education trends across the zoo community. The survey uses the zoo visitor questionnaire to enable comparisons between zoos and zoo visitor perception. Finally, we compare our results with that of the UK.

This study found that zoo's do have a certain degree of positive impact on visitors through experience rather than academic signage. Based on the preference of visitors for experience-orientated information over more academic signage, any action-orientated engagement is best linked to the exhibit through knowledge enrichment.