Ueno Zoo

Listen for a moment. Somewhere ahead, a gibbon is calling, a rising whoop that bounces off the tall trees. Gravel crunches under strollers. A school group in matching yellow hats passes by in a neat line. The air carries leaf litter, warm concrete, and a faint farmyard smell drifting from the enclosures. This is Ueno Zoo, in the heart of Tokyo's Ueno Park, and it has been doing this, mixing city noise with animal calls, for more than a century.

Ueno Zoo opened in 1882, which makes it the oldest zoo in Japan. That date matters. Japan had only recently ended centuries of relative isolation and was racing to absorb ideas from Europe and America. Museums, railways, and public parks arrived together. A zoo fit that same idea. It was a place where ordinary people could see the wider natural world for themselves. The zoo began as part of a natural history museum project, and it grew from there into the place you are walking through now.

The ground under your feet has an older story. Before it was a park, much of Ueno belonged to Kan'ei-ji, a powerful Buddhist temple. The temple was closely tied to the Tokugawa shoguns, the military rulers of Japan before the modern era. Most of the temple complex was destroyed in fighting in 1868, when the shogun's supporters made a last stand here. The new government turned the scarred hillside into one of Japan's first public parks. The zoo grew up inside that park.

Here is a detail many visitors walk straight past. Inside the zoo's East Garden stands a five-storey wooden pagoda, painted in deep red, with dark tiled roofs stacked one above another. It belongs to the old temple world of Ueno, not to the zoo. It survived the fighting and the fires that followed. So you can watch animals in the foreground while an Edo-period pagoda rises behind them. Edo is the old name for Tokyo, and the name for the shogun era.

The zoo is split into two halves. The East Garden sits on the higher ground near the main gate. The West Garden lies lower down, close to Shinobazu Pond, a wide pond famous for lotus plants in summer. For decades, a small suspended monorail carried visitors between the two halves. It opened in the 1950s and was promoted as Japan's first monorail. It stopped running in 2019, so today the two gardens are linked on foot.

Now for the animals that made this zoo famous across Japan. In 1972, two giant pandas named Kang Kang and Lan Lan arrived from China. Their arrival marked the restoration of diplomatic relations between Japan and China. The public response was enormous. People queued for hours for a glimpse that lasted only seconds. From that moment, pandas and Ueno became linked in the national imagination. Panda shapes still appear on signs, snacks, and souvenirs across the neighbourhood.

Later generations of pandas kept that bond alive. A pair named Ri Ri and Shin Shin arrived in 2011, just months after the great earthquake and tsunami in north-eastern Japan, and they brought some comfort at a hard time. Their cubs were born here, and each birth became national news. The panda residents have changed over the years, as pandas on loan return to China. So check the zoo's current information before you set your heart on seeing one.

The zoo also holds a painful chapter. During the Second World War, in 1943, the authorities ordered many large animals at Ueno to be killed. The official fear was that bombing could free them into the city. Three elephants were among them. Their slow deaths were later told in a children's book called Faithful Elephants, and many Japanese people first learned about the war through that story. A memorial to the animals stands within the zoo grounds.

What came next is a quieter, more hopeful story. After the war, Tokyo had no elephants left. Children wrote letters asking for one. In 1949, an elephant named Indira arrived as a gift from India, sent by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Another elephant, Hanako, came from Thailand around the same time. Crowds of children came to meet them. For many families, these elephants became a symbol that ordinary life was returning.

Today the collection is wide. Western lowland gorillas live in a wooded enclosure in the East Garden. Sumatran tigers pace nearby. In the West Garden, look for okapi, a shy forest animal from Central Africa. With its striped legs it looks like a zebra, but it is actually a close relative of the giraffe. There are also flamingos by the water, along with small mammals and reptiles. Many enclosures now try to copy natural habitats, with plants, rocks, and shade, rather than bare cages.

The human life of the zoo is just as interesting. Watch the families. Grandparents in sun hats push grandchildren in strollers. Couples share snacks on benches. Office workers sometimes slip in on a weekday for a slow walk. School groups stand in front of the gorillas and take careful notes on clipboards. For many Tokyo residents, a first visit to Ueno Zoo is a childhood memory. Some come back decades later with children of their own.

The zoo also sits in a remarkable neighbourhood. Ueno Park is home to several major museums, including the Tokyo National Museum and the National Museum of Western Art. There are shrines, temples, and long avenues of cherry trees. In spring, those trees draw huge crowds for flower viewing. You can easily turn a zoo morning into a full day of art, history, and a slow walk around Shinobazu Pond.

Before you move on, pause somewhere with a view. Perhaps it is the red pagoda above the trees, or the flat shine of the pond below the West Garden. Notice how the city never fully disappears here. A train rumbles somewhere in the distance. A crow calls from a rooftop. And somewhere close, an animal is resting in the shade, unaware that it is part of a story more than a century long. As you walk out, listen for that gibbon one more time.