In vitro zoysia grass regeneration has several difficulties. We report here a simple and reproducible protocol by using seed explants. We selected the yellow colored calli for plant regeneration, as other types of calli were found to be poor in their capacity for callus multiplication and/or shoot induction. However, both previous reports and the present study encountered difficulties in plant regeneration with the yellow type calli during their growth and shoot multiplication. Some of the major difficulties included the formation of different types of calli from a single explant that appeared to be of a regenerable type of calli (yellow compact, yellowish white compact and white friable), abnormal growth induction from the callus (hairy root formation, browning, and formation white compact structures resembling somatic embryos), greening of callus without further shoot formation, micro-shoot formation without further growth and conversion of micro-shoots into callus. To circumvent these difficulties, we established an improved protocol for zoysia regeneration. Results showed that 2iP (1.0 $mg{cdot}L^{-1}$) and $GA_3$ (1.0 $mg{cdot}L^{-1}$) not only enhanced shoot induction percentage, but also increased the number of shoots from the callus cultures when compared with BAP treatments. During shoot initiation, the difficulties mentioned above were substantially alleviated. Both shoot induction and simultaneous shoot elongation were satisfactorily achieved on the same medium. The elongated shoots were rooted on half MS media. The simple but reproducible regeneration protocol established in this study may facilitate the work on transformation and genetic improvements for $Zoysia$ $japonica$ Steud. and other closely related grass species.