Japanese fans rushed to farewell the country’s last two pandas on Sunday ahead of their return to China, in a departure that highlights strained relations between the two countries.
Twin cubs Xiao Xiao and Lei Lei will leave Tokyo’s Ueno Zoo today after meeting their fans for the last time on the weekend.
They were born in the Japanese capital, but China retains ownership over them, under the rules of Beijing’s “panda diplomacy.”
The government there treats pandas as national symbols and goodwill ambassadors, loaning them to countries with which they wish to strengthen ties.
The duo’s departure leaves Japan without any pandas for the first time in more than five decades, at a time when relations between Asia’s two biggest economies are at their lowest point in years.
And politics wasn’t far from visitors’ minds when they paid last visits to the pandas over the past week.
“I’m really sad,” visitor Shoken Ikeda told CNN during a recent trip to the zoo with his wife.
“We always said, ‘There’s a panda here, so we’ll get to see it sometime,’ and then this happened. I wish I’d come more often.”
Long lines began to form in the weeks leading up to the pandas’ last encounter with the public, prompting the zoo to switch to a lottery system for tickets.
Japan welcomed its first pandas in 1972 to mark the normalisation of diplomatic ties with China.
Since then, more pandas have arrived or were born locally, gaining a huge following.
Last year, China also took back four pandas from the zoo of a Japanese town which relied heavily on panda-related tourism.
China’s decision not to renew the leases of those four bears was potentially related to Taiwan as well, one international relations expert told CNN earlier, coming after Shirahama elected a mayor with a pro-Taiwan stance.
Chinese authorities have also suspended seafood imports and banned exports of rare earth elements with military uses, as they demand that Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi should withdraw her comment.
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