Tokyo: Crowds gathered at Ueno Zoo on Sunday to bid farewell to Xiao Xiao and Lei Lei, the only remaining giant pandas in Japan, ahead of their scheduled return to China on Tuesday. The four-year-old male and female twins drew thousands of visitors who had secured tickets through a lottery system, as Sunday marked the final day the public could see them. Once the pair leaves, Japan will be without giant pandas for the first time in about 50 years.
According to Philippines News Agency, giant pandas first came to Japan in 1972. To commemorate the year's normalization of diplomatic relations between Japan and China, Kang Kang and Lan Lan, a male-female pair, were gifted to Ueno Zoo, sparking an unprecedented panda craze at the zoo. After that, pandas were also raised in the town of Shirahama in Wakayama Prefecture and in the city of Kobe in Hyogo Prefecture, both in western Japan, but the only ones currently living in Japan are the twins born at Ueno Zoo in 2021.
To manage demand, the zoo adopted a lottery system in which prospective visitors were asked to apply for tickets in advance for viewing from January 14. There was a flood of applications for Sunday's 4,400 viewing slots, with the competition rate reaching 24.6 times. The twins were born to parents loaned for breeding research purposes, so ownership remains with China.
"They were big!" Yuzuki Tsuzuki, a six-year-old from the city of Fuchu in western Tokyo and who came to see the twin pandas with her mother and grandmother, said excitedly. "Stay well even after you go to China. Make sure you eat plenty of food," she said, waving at the twins.
Rikako Samizo, 31, visited the zoo with her two-year-old daughter, Reira. "I'm glad my daughter enjoyed (seeing the twins)," she said. Reira smiled at her mother and said "they were cute." "They were a source of comfort. I'll miss them." Kanako Ito, whose love for pandas led her to study Chinese at university, said. "I want to visit China someday," the 20-year-old student from Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture, central Japan, said.
Sachiko Makita, a 43-year-old office worker from Isehara, Kanagawa Prefecture, south of Tokyo, who had visited the zoo almost every month, murmured sadly: "Just stay well. Please come back again."
