Passion for ‘Xiao Xiao’ and ‘Lei Lei’: queues of more than three hours to see the last pandas in Japan before their return to China | Climate and Environment

Hundreds of people queued for more than three hours this Tuesday to see Japan’s last two pandas at the Ueno Zoo in Tokyo, a day after confirming that they will return to China at the end of January, a month earlier than expected.

March of the twin pandas 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 pandas in the world – which they transfer by contract to global zoos within the framework of a conservation program -, following comments by the Japanese Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi, about Taiwan.

There is so much interest in seeing the animals for the last time that the Ueno Zoo, where they reside, has been forced to limit the number of daily visitors allowed into the panda enclosure to 4,800, and the visiting time to just one minute per person, the zoo detailed in a statement. Starting next Tuesday and until January 25, the last day on which it will be possible to see Xiao Xiao and Lei Leiit will be necessary to reserve in advance, indicated the center.

The diplomatic tension between Japan and China has raised doubts about whether the Asian giant will allow the sending of new specimens to the archipelago, after the deadline to return the two Ueno pandas to Beijing, the last in Japanese territory, expires in February.

The return of the twins is added to another carried out last June, when the four pandas residing at the Adventure World complex in Shirahama, in the 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 decades and was consolidated in Japan with the arrival of the first specimens to the Ueno zoo, the oldest in the country, in 1972, after the normalization of relations between the two countries. Since then, Japan has welcomed 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 (about 166 million euros) in 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.