"Poor Elephants"), is a story written by Yukio Tsuchiya and originally published in Japan in 1951.
[1] It was published and marketed as a true story of the elephants in Tokyo's Ueno Zoo during World War II[2] but contained fiction.
Tsuchiya wrote the book in order to let children know the grief, fear, and sadness caused by war.
[6] Youth Literature scholars, notably Professor Emeritus Kay E. Vandergrift, Rutgers, Department of Library and Information Science, have contested the claim that the story is factual, referring to it as "historical fiction for children".
[7] Dr. Betsy Hearne, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, writes: “Certainly a story can be culturally confusing, as was Yukio Tsuchiya's The Faithful Elephants: A True Story of Animals, People, and War (1988), which turned out to be a legend, and a complex one at that.”[8] The story served as a major plot point in the Doraemon manga short and animated episode Uncle and His Elephant,[9] as well as episode 5 of the anime adaptation of Mitsuboshi Colors.