War-era canvases of animals resurface

Wartime-era paintings depicting animals have been stored in obscurity for decades at Nagoya City Art Museum and until recently their existence was unknown to the general population.

The three sets of paintings named "Moju Garo Hekiga" ("Fierce Animal Mural Painting") show such animals as polar bears and African elephants, and they were reportedly displayed at Higashiyama Zoo and Botanical Gardens in Chikusa Ward, Nagoya, shortly after World War II to entertain visitors who could not, at that time, see live animals.

But the zoo has no record of these artworks.

The facility, which opened in 1937, is famous for its two Asian elephants that survived a slaughter during the war even though other animals, including lions, were killed.

During the war, as U.S. air raids intensified, the military ordered the zoo to kill its fierce animals.

After the war ended, the zoo became well-known for arranging special trains — dubbed the "Elephant Train" — to bring children from all over Japan to Nagoya so they could see the only two surviving elephants in the country.

The works were created by three late painters — Saburo Ota, who was a member of the art group Kofukai and served as the first director of Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art; Kiyoshi Mizutani, a founder of Chubu Shunyokai, an artists' group; and Saburo Miyamoto, who was a member of Nikikai and famous for his painting depicting a meeting between two commanders, Lt. Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita and of British counterpart, Arthur Percival.

He made the painting while in the military, tasked with recording wartime events through his works.

All three were top-ranked painters at the time.

In his works, Ota expressed a mixed world of the two poles with polar bears and penguins. Mizutani painted tigers in the Asian jungle, while Miyamoto's landscapes depicted the African savanna and elephants.

Each painting is 1.4 meters long and 5.4 meters wide. According to an article that appeared in the Chukyo Shimbun, a newspaper that operated from 1946 until 1952, the zoo began displaying the paintings in the hippopotamus house on Nov. 13, 1948.

At that time, the paper suggested the zoo display the paintings "to fill a sense of loneliness without savage beasts," and the late Eiichi Kitao, the zoo's first director and the one who spared the elephants during the war, extended his full backing to the idea.

No current officials at the zoo knew about the existence of the paintings, but Koichi Chaya, the zoo's breeding director who was shown photos of the paintings, thinks the display must have helped the zoo and visitors to fill the war-torn void.

"Around that time, as there were few animals at the zoo, and it may have been interesting for people to just see the paintings," he said.

But it is unknown how long the artworks were on display. According to the zoo, the paintings appear to have been already removed in 1952, when a male hippopotamus came to be housed in the facility.

Later on, the paintings were relocated to a Nagoya tourist facility in Naka Ward, where Ota's work was displayed in the cafeteria.

When the building was closed, the paintings were at risk of being destroyed. In 1997, when Nagoya City Art Museum was asked to judge whether the paintings should be preserved, it decided they were worth keeping. But there are no current plans to put them on display.

This section, appearing Saturdays, features topics and issues from the Chubu region covered by the local daily Chunichi Shimbun. The original article was published on Aug. 13.

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