Hundreds of people queued for more than three hours on Tuesday to see Japan’s last two pandas at Tokyo’s Ueno Zoo, a day after confirming they would return to China at the end of January, a month earlier than expected.
Twin panda walking Xiao Xiao And Lei Lei will leave the archipelago without these animals for the first time since 1972, in the midst of a cooling of relations between Tokyo and Beijing, owner of all the world’s pandas – which they hand over by contract to world zoos as part of a conservation program -, following the remarks of the Japanese Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi, about Taiwan.
There is so much interest in seeing the animals for the last time that Ueno Zoo, where they reside, has been forced to limit the number of daily visitors allowed in the panda enclosure to 4,800, and visiting duration to just one minute per person, the zoo detailed in a statement. From next Tuesday until January 25, the last day on which it will be possible to see Xiao Xiao And Lei LeiYou will need to book in advance, the center said.
The diplomatic tension between Japan and China has raised doubts as to whether the Asian giant would authorize the sending of new specimens to the archipelago, after the deadline to repatriate the two pandas from Ueno to Beijing, the last on Japanese territory, expired in February.
The return of the twins is in addition to another made last June, when the four pandas residing at the Adventure World complex in Shirahama, in Wakayama prefecture (center), returned to China, after Beijing refused to extend the loan agreement with the Japanese facilities.
The sending of pandas as a diplomatic tool by China dates back several decades and was consolidated in Japan with the arrival of the first specimens at the Ueno zoo, the oldest in the country, in 1972, after the normalization of relations between the two countries. Since then, Japan has hosted and raised more than twenty specimens, which have been received with great enthusiasm by the Japanese and have served as a symbol of friendship between nations.
Only at Ueno Zoo, Xiao Xiao And Lei Lei They had an economic impact of more than 30 billion yen (around 166 million euros) the first year after their presentation to the public in 2021, according to estimates published by Katsuhiro Miyamoto, professor emeritus of economics at Kansai University.
About The Author
