Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post (SCMP) and others reported that “Adventure World” in Wakayama Prefecture, Japan, has introduced a “Panda Brewer Experience Tour.”
Adventure World repatriated four pandas, Lauhin and their young Yuihin, Saihin and Huhin, to China in June last year. Lauhin is known to be the first panda born in Japan to grow into an adult. The Panda Breeders Experience Tour is held every Saturday, Sunday, and national holidays with no more than 10 people per day. The experience consists of visiting panda play areas, living spaces, introducing breeding cases, and feeding experiences. However, there are no actual pandas, and staff members dress up as pandas to enter the cage. Visitors hand over apples and bamboo trees to experience indirect feeding, and after completion, they receive a “credentials.”
It is reported that applications for the tour are quickly closed even at a relatively high cost of 8,000 yen per person.
The background of the park’s introduction of the program is also known to have reduced the number of visitors after the repatriation of the panda family. While some criticized that the program was too artificial, many of the participants responded positively. One visitor said, “I was happy just to be in the same space as my favorite panda.”
Meanwhile, the last remaining pandas, Xiao Xiao and Lei Lei, will leave Tokyo’s Ueno Zoo and return to China later this month. The waiting time has reportedly increased to three hours as visitors flock to the zoo ahead of the return.
Ueno Zoo sought to extend the deadline or rent a new one to China ahead of the February 20 deadline for return, but eventually returned it a month earlier than the scheduled date.
China has maintained the so-called “panda diplomacy” of lending giant pandas to overseas zoos, and it is a rule to return pandas born abroad around the age of 4 when they become adults. If all the pandas disappear from Japan, this will be the first time since 1972.
JULIE KIM
US ASIA JOURNAL
