JAPAN: Tiger, Tiger

In 1945 American bombings forced keepers at Tokyo's Ueno Zoo to kill their dangerous charges. Since then the crowds (70,000 daily*) that come to the zoo have had to content themselves with substitutes. They watch six monkeys and two house cats play in the huge polar bear caves, stare at the modest antics of a Jersey cow, now the sole occupant of the wild boar's pen.

Tokyo schoolchildren wrote to the zoo keepers to say that the slaughter of their animals constituted "unbearable acts of indignity." To console them, the keepers had the...