Adieu Hippo – Die fast vergessenen Opfer des Ueno-Zoos im Zweiten Weltkrieg

In spring 1945, the acting director of the Ueno Zoo in Tokyo, Saburō Fukuda, decided to starve the two remaining hippopotami to death because of an expected shortage of feedstuff. This is reminiscent of the events in late summer 1943, when Fukuda had the three elephants of Ueno Zoo killed in the same way. However, those elephants had to die for propaganda reasons on orders of the governor of Tokyo, so the fault was not Fukuda's alone. Whereas their heavily distorted and sentimentalized story has become widely known even outside of Japan, the fate of the hippopotami, on the other hand, has scarcely been noticed by the public. The article describes these events and the attempts in the late 1980s to have the hippopotami, too, acknowledged as victims of war.