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Starving the Elephants: The Slaughter of Animals in Wartime Tokyo's Ueno Zoo

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Frederick S. Litten
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“Speaking of wartime Ueno Zoo, what comes to your mind? ‘The elephants were killed! ‘Yes, that's right.” So begins Sayōnara Kaba-kun (Farewell, Hippo; Saotome, 1989), a picture book for grade school children.

There are numerous Japanese depictions and stories of the wartime slaughter of animals at Ueno Zoo: from the enormously popular and influential picture book Kawaisōna Zō (The Pitiful Elephants) (Tsuchiya & Takebe, 2009)-originally published by Tsuchiya Yukio as a short story for children in 1951, then as a picture book in 1970 with 163 editions to date-to the recent TV drama Zō no Hanako (The Elephant Hanako; Kōno & Terada, 2007). The story has also travelled outside Japan, with two English and one French translations of Kawaisōna Zō. Most of these depictions portray the slaughter of the animals as motivated by the wish to protect humans from more or less immediate danger and accept the starvation of the elephants as unavoidable. Scholarly studies have been published so far only in Japanese and tend to be critical only in some points (e.g., Hasegawa, 2000; originally published in 1981), if at all.

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Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 7 , Issue 38 , September 2009 , e3
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Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
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Copyright © The Authors 2009

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