Japan is about to lose a juicy business

“We came from the Kansai region (in western Japan) so that our daughter could finally see real pandas,” Aki Nakayama explained this Friday from the Ueno Zoological Garden in Tokyo, where she traveled accompanied by her one-and-a-half-year-old daughter and her husband, who hopes that “they will act soon” to prevent Japan from be left without them.

The loan of the Ueno twins expires next February, at which time the two pandas will be repatriated to China after reaching their fourth year of life, as established by protocol, leaving Japan without specimens of this animal for the first time since 1972if new transfers are not decided.

A farewell that will be added to the return last June the four pandas that lived in the Adventure World complex from the town of Shirahama, in Wakayama prefecture (center), and who returned to China after Beijing refused to extend the loan contract for the facilities.

Preparations for the operation concerning Xiao Xiao and Lei Lei take place amid the current cooling climate of bilateral relations between Japan and China after some controversial statements about Taiwan, which raises doubts about the arrival of new specimens to the Japanese archipelago.

Japan’s new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi (who took office in October 2025) provoked a strong reaction of fury in China due to her explicit comments about Taiwan.

Takaichi suggested that in case China attacked the island of Taiwan (which Beijing claims as its own territory), Japan could be forced to resort to force.

The use of sending pandas as a diplomatic tool by China with foreign powers goes back decades, and was consolidated in Japan with the arrival of the first specimens at the Ueno facilities, the oldest in the country, in 1972 after the normalization of relations between both countries.

The 1994 start of the long-term breeding project at Adventure World was also the first of its kind outside of China.

Since then, these charismatic animals have served as a symbol of friendship between the two countries and the Japanese population has developed a special affection for them.

Japan has received and raised more than twenty specimens of a panda bear in joint programs over the years, to the joy of the Japanese, who have participated massively in campaigns to name the babies newborns, or visited the different zoos en masse to greet them at their presentations.

“We want to come back before they leave, we enjoyed it a lot and they are very adorable,” said Hatsuko Oi and Michiko Higuchi, both 66 years old, during their visit to the pandas in the Ueno enclosure, packed with visitors who also wanted to say goodbye to them.

T-shirts, bags, stuffed animals, clothes or shoes full of drawings of pandas are just some of the ‘merchandising’ possibilities that visitors can purchase in stores throughout the Asian country about this bear, which beyond being a diplomatic symbol, also contributes a great source of income for the Japanese economy.

At Ueno Zoo alone, Xiao Xiao and Lei Lei had an economic impact of more than 30 billion yen (about 166 million euros) in the first year after its presentation to the public in 2021, according to estimates published by Katsuhiro Miyamoto, professor emeritus of Economics at Kansai University.

In Shirahama, known as ‘the panda village’ (Panda Town), the presence of its recently returned pandas generated an estimated income of about 125.6 billion yen (about 690 million euros) in the last three decades, according to the academic, who estimates that their departure could cause the town losses equivalent to 40% of its annual budget.

The scheduled departure of Xiao Xiao and Lei Lei will not only leave the enclosures empty, but could mark a symbolic setback in the exchanges and cooperation of the last half century that have turned the panda bear into a cultural and economic bridge between China and Japan.

“I hope this is not a farewell, how sad,” expressed Oi and Higuchi, who find in these animals an icon of sweetness. pbz-yk/mra/cc