Sapporo City Maruyama Zoo

About this audio guide

This guide to Sapporo City Maruyama Zoo follows Hanako, an elephant calf who arrived in July nineteen fifty-three, only two years after the zoo opened with little more than two brown bears and a deer. You'll hear how she became the city's whole attraction, watched over by generations of zookeepers as three generations of the same families lined up outside her pen. It follows her to a sixtieth birthday party in July two thousand six, when a grandmother, a mother and a daughter could all say the same elephant taught them the word elephant.