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Summary Thousands of people flocked to a zoo in Tokyo to see two giant pandas, who made debut on Friday.
More than 8,000 people poured into the zoo in less than two hours after it reopened and thousands more are expected to follow.Visitors gathered outside the glass enclosures of the two pandas to get a glimpse of the rare animals. Shin Shin (female) and Ri Ri (male), both five years old, reached the capital’s Ueno Zoological Park on February 21 after a journey of nearly 4,000 km (2,500 miles) from their home town in China’s Sichuan province.The pair’s scheduled first appearance in public was called off when the zoo was temporarily closed to save power after the double calamity left 28,000 dead or missing and triggered the worlds worst atomic crisis in 25 years at a nuclear plant in northeastern Japan.Friday also marked the reopening of the Ueno Zoo after two weeks of closure. Their experience in Tokyo has made the panda pair survivors of the deadliest earthquakes for decades in both China and Japan.Both pandas were living at the China Giant Panda Protection and Research Centre in Sichuan when a quake of 7.8 magnitude struck China on May 12, 2008, killing almost 70,000 and leaving millions homeless.A donation stand was set up inside the zoo to raise funds for Japan’s earthquake and tsunami victims.
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