Indira was the elephant Japan's children asked for. After the war, Ueno Zoo had no elephants, and in 1949 India's prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, sent her as a gift. Ochiai Shogo, a keeper at the zoo, had looked after her ever since. By 1967 he was 54 and very ill with stomach cancer. He was at home on sick leave.
On 14 March 1967, Indira got into a fight with Jumbo, the other elephant in her house, and ended up outside her yard, in the walkway where visitors stand. According to the Mainichi newspaper of the day, about 15,000 people were in the zoo, most of them families. Staff tried to lead her back and she would not go. Then news helicopters began circling low, and the noise upset her more.
"Let's ask Ochiai"
A keeper said it out loud: "Let's ask Ochiai." Some of the elephant team had already gone to his home for advice. A former keeper who trained under him wrote that Ochiai agreed at once and came in a padded night robe. The zoo's own account says he came in his nightclothes. A Fukuoka radio feature says illness had left him at 36 kilograms.
The zoo says he walked up and called to her in a voice that did not sound like a sick man's: "Indira, you mustn't. Go back." Her eyes softened, and she let him lead her back to her house. By the former keeper's count, it took about ten minutes.
What happened after
Ochiai died eight days later, on 22 March, aged 54. That same keeper wrote that he told his wife, "I'm a lucky man. I got to look after Indira one last time."
The same radio feature has a gentler detail. Afterwards, it says, at the hour he had come that day, Indira would stand looking in the direction he had come from, listening. She lived until August 1983, when she was 49.
See it yourself
- Ueno Park. The zoo sits inside the park, near Ueno Station, and its elephants still live there.
- The elephants. Asian elephants are still kept there, and the zoo is a short walk from the park paths where the tour pauses.
Hear it on the tour
Sources
- 上野動物園［公式］ X thread, 14 March 2017, collected on Togetter
- BUZZmag, 2017 write-up of the zoo's thread, with the FM Fukuoka radio detail
- FM Fukuoka, "Human Street", 12 February 2012
- Elephant Talk, a former Ueno keeper's memoir (2022)
- Mynavi, 14 March 2024, citing the Mainichi evening edition of 14 March 1967
- 「猛獣の脱走劇」, Sujiebi blog, 2021
- 上野動物園, Japanese Wikipedia
Photo credits
- Two Asian elephants at Ueno Zoo today: Guilhem Vellut / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0, resized
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