Tokyo
—
On Sunday, Japanese fans rushed to bid farewell to the country’s last two pandas ahead of their return to China, a departure that highlighted the strained relations between the two countries.
Baby twins Xiaoxiao and Lei Lei are scheduled to leave Tokyo’s Ueno Zoo on Tuesday after last seeing fans over the weekend.
Although they were born in the Japanese capital, China retains ownership of them under the Chinese government’s “panda diplomacy” rules. The country’s government treats pandas as national symbols and goodwill ambassadors, lending pandas to countries with which it wants to strengthen ties.
Their departure comes as relations between Asia’s two largest economies are at their worst in years, leaving Japan without pandas for the first time in more than 50 years.
And politics wasn’t far from the minds of the last visitors to the pandas last week.
“It’s really sad,” visitor Shoken Ikeda, who recently visited the zoo with his wife, told CNN. “I always said, ‘There are pandas here, so let’s go see them someday,’ but this happened. I wish I had come more often.”
In the weeks leading up to the pandas’ final public appearance, long lines began to form, and the zoo switched to a lottery system for tickets.
Another panda fan, Yukie Hisayama, said she waited in line for five hours to see the pandas in early December. She came to see them again last week because she won the lottery.
“It’s very unfortunate. It’s sad that such cute and innocent animals are being used as diplomatic trumpets or tools,” she said.
According to zookeepers, the siblings each have different personalities. Xiaoxiao is timid, but his younger sister Lei Lei is fearless and adapts quickly to change.
The two pandas were born at Ueno Zoo in 2021 to mother Xin Xing and father Lili. Her parents were returned to China in 2024, and a year later, her twin sister, Xiangxiang, was also repatriated.
Japan welcomed its first panda in 1972 to commemorate the normalization of diplomatic relations with China. Since then, many more pandas have arrived or been born locally, gaining a huge following.
However, comments by Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, suggesting that China’s invasion of Taiwan could trigger a military response from Taiwan, have recently drawn China’s ire.
In response, the Chinese government has taken a series of economic pressure measures, including cutting back on flights and warning citizens not to travel to Japan. Tourism Minister Yasushi Kaneko announced last week that the number of Chinese tourists visiting Japan fell by almost half to about 330,000 last month compared to the same month last year.
Chinese authorities also demanded that Takaichi retract his statements, suspended imports of marine products, and banned exports of rare earth elements for military use. Japan’s leader said in November that her comments were “hypothetical” and that she would never make similar comments again.
Meanwhile, Takaichi, who won an internal Liberal Democratic Party election in October to secure power, called a general election on February 8 to strengthen his mandate on a range of policies, which could include a tougher stance on China.
Last year, China also adopted four pandas from a zoo in a Japanese town that relied heavily on panda-related tourism.
In Shirahama, a secluded resort town on Japan’s southern coast, a store selling panda goods and a ramen restaurant serving bear-themed ramen have been abandoned.
An international relations expert earlier told CNN that China’s decision not to renew the leases of these four bears could also be related to Taiwan after Shirahama elected a mayor with pro-Taiwan views.
For now, Ueno Zoo officials plan to maintain the panda facility as is and hope for the best.
“The facility was designed specifically for giant pandas, so it’s not easy to adapt it to other animals,” said Jin Suzuki, the zoo’s director of animal care and exhibitions, who helped care for Xiaoxiao and Leiley from day one.
He hopes to continue collaborating with China, at least on conservation and breeding research. But most of all, he hopes the pandas will return someday.
“It’s not just a cute animal, it’s a fascinating animal, so I’d like as many people as possible to see it.”
CNN’s Mai Takiguchi and Yosuke Tomita contributed to this report.
