JAPAN: Tiger, Tiger

In 1945 American bombings forced keepers at Tokyo’s Ueno Zoo to kill their dangerous charges. Since then the crowds (70,000 daily*) that come to the zoo have had to content themselves with substitutes. They watch six monkeys and two house cats play in the huge polar bear caves, stare at the modest antics of a Jersey cow, now the sole occupant of the wild boar’s pen.

Tokyo schoolchildren wrote to the zoo keepers to say that the slaughter of their animals constituted “unbearable acts of indignity.” To console them, the keepers had the beasts stuffed and reinstalled in their cages or in glass showcases. In death as in life the zoo’s star attraction was Tora San, the huge tiger. Propped up before a painted backdrop of lush green jungle, his bared fangs sent many a moppet scurrying closer to his mother’s kimono.

Recently Tora San suffered another act of indignity. Thieves broke into his cage, stripped off his skin from tail to ears. Tokyo’s police thought that the remains of Tora San were well on their way to becoming tiger-skin wallets. Last week police found a tiger’s head, placed it in Tora San’s cage. But keepers and children (who know their tigers) indignantly insisted that the new head was not Tora San’s. This one had been ripped off somebody’s rug.

* Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo may get as many as 100,000 on busy Sundays and holidays, 15,000 to 20,000 on weekdays. On a good day New York City’s Bronx Zoo usually gets a 60,000 to 70,000 attendance, has seen a record 83,000.