The Execution of the Xinjing Zoo’s Wild Animals

The Execution of the Xinjing Zoo’s Wild Animals is the wartime killing of dangerous animals at the zoo in Hsin-ching in August 1945, as Soviet forces approached. Ordered in the face of a collapsing military position, the operation ends with the deaths of the tigers, leopards, wolves, and bears, while the elephants are spared. The episode is at once a practical act of wartime precaution and a measure of the dwindling capacity of the Japanese military: the animals are killed, but the soldiers recognize that their rifles cannot meaningfully threaten the elephants.

Causes and Setting

The veterinarian’s recollection places the killing in the final days of Manchukuo. Soviet troops had crossed the border and were pressing toward Hsin-ching, while the Kwantung Army had lost much of its equipment and strength. In a related account of the period, a military officer explains that the army had been depleted by the wider war and lacked enough rifles and ammunition even to equip all its men. The zoo’s animals therefore faced a decision made under the pressure of impending battle, not an ordinary routine of animal care.

The event belongs to a wider military world in which geography, supply, and preparation shaped what soldiers could do. The officer recounts being assigned to accompany Yamamoto across the border region because he knew its topography and was responsible for improving maps. Accurate military maps mattered for locating camps, artillery, water, and routes for troops and horses; in the featureless landscape near the Khalkha River, even determining a position could be uncertain. Elsewhere, research into a possible winter war with the Soviet Union showed that the Japanese Army’s equipment was inadequate for Siberian cold. These accounts do not explain the zoo order directly, but they give its setting a larger pattern: imperial military plans depended on material capacities that were increasingly absent.

The Killing and the Decision to Spare the Elephants

In Nutmeg’s memory, Japanese soldiers move through the zoo under an officer’s command, shooting animals considered capable of attacking people. The killing includes tigers, leopards, wolves, and bears. The action is presented as an organized military operation, carried out by soldiers who do not speak as they proceed. The zoo’s animal inhabitants are treated as a potential threat to human survival in a city expecting the arrival of enemy forces.

The bears make the limits of that control especially plain. Even after sustaining many shots, the two large animals continue to resist, and their deaths take longer than the soldiers expect. The effort leaves the men exhausted. Afterwards, some spit on the ground, a gesture the narrative connects to their difficulty in facing what they have done. Their reaction does not undo the killing, but it distinguishes the operation from routine combat: the soldiers find it harder to kill animals in cages than people on a battlefield, where they themselves may also be killed.

The elephants are not killed. Once the soldiers confront their size, their rifles seem inadequate, and the lieutenant decides to leave them alone. The men are relieved. The decision is both practical and humane in its immediate effect, though the veterinarian also notes that the Chinese workers may have regretted losing the meat and ivory that killing the elephants would have provided. The scene holds these different interests together without making the animals’ fate merely a symbol: the elephants remain living animals, and their survival follows from a specific judgment about what the soldiers can do.

Aftermath at the Zoo

After the operation, Chinese workers remove the dead animals from their cages and take them to an empty warehouse. The lieutenant completes the paperwork with the zoo director, and the soldiers march away. The workers wash blood from the cage floors and scrub away pieces of flesh. They then ask the veterinarian how the bodies should be disposed of. In ordinary circumstances, he would have called a professional, but the impending battle and the flight from the city have made such help unavailable. With summer at its height and flies gathering, burial would be necessary, yet the work would be immense and there is no heavy equipment to help.

The veterinarian’s morning after the killings registers their consequences through the changed sounds of the zoo. The voices and smells of the tigers, leopards, wolves, and bears are gone; the dull ache in his ears from the rifles confirms that the previous day was not a dream. The elephants’ trumpeting brings relief because they survived. At the same time, the emptied cages make daily work easier. When two Chinese boys come to help feed the remaining animals, the veterinarian recognizes that the absence of the large carnivores has spared him a difficult and dangerous task, even as he feels the loss of the animals he had cared for.

Memory and Retelling

The event persists beyond its immediate setting as a story Nutmeg kept to herself for many years. She had witnessed the zoo killings from the deck of a transport ship in August 1945, while an American submarine trained its cannon on the vessel and prepared to sink it. After Cinnamon was born, she began telling him the story in a near whisper, before he could understand words. As he grew able to follow it, he repeatedly asked for it again and for additional branches of the same account. The telling accumulated details and developed into what Nutmeg calls an interlocking system of myths.

The later retelling joins the zoo’s destruction to the threat confronting the transport ship, but the two episodes remain distinct parts of Nutmeg’s remembered experience. The animal killings begin as a secret she has not shared; telling them to Cinnamon makes the past available to another person and allows it to expand through repeated narration. The remembered zoo is also a place of concrete lives and losses, not only an emblem of war: the animals are killed or spared according to their actual vulnerability to weapons and the decisions of the soldiers. In this way, the event becomes both a record of military collapse and the origin of a family story shaped by memory, silence, and repetition.