Response to

Faithful Elephants: A True Story of Animals, People, and War

By Yukio Tsuchiya

          The passage, Faithful Elephants: A True Story of Animals, People, and War, is about how World War Two and the bombing in Japan forced Ueno Zoo to kill all of their animals. The setting in this passage is relevant to notice. In the beginning, the setting was described as "sparkling" and cheerful but in the end the setting is really depressing. Tsuchiya uses quite a lot of symbolism to describe the settings as well.  He also used metaphors or similes to describe either the happiness or sadness of the setting. Tsuchiya's primary focus in this passage was on the setting because it brought the reader's attention to the theme clearly.
 

          To begin, the general setting was Ueno Zoo, which was in Japan. The reader would not have expected that the story would be about World War Two because of the setting in the beginning. For instance, according to the passage, it says "[the cherry blossom's] petals are falling in the soft breeze and sparkling in the sun. Beneath the cherry trees, crowds of people are pushing to enter the zoo on such a beautiful day." This part of the text describes the setting as beautiful and cheerful. Suddenly, the setting makes a sharp turn when the author talks about the tombstone and how many animals died. The author than introduces a new setting in the "same" place by making the zoo keeper talk about the depressing story of the faithful elephants. 

          Furthermore, the zoo keeper, or the author, gives the reader a sense of imagery to describe the sadness of the setting. The zoo keeper says, the elephants were tottering which gives the reader an image of the elephants limping and what they were going through at the time. Another example of the author giving a sense of imagery was when he described the elephants in their cage, becoming "thinner and thinner, weaker and weaker." The reader would be able to imagine the elephants gradually getting skinnier which reminds him/her about the time and setting.

          Also, the author uses some figurative language to describe the sad elephants. For example, he says that the elephant's eyes "began to look like round rubber balls in their drooping, shrunken faces." Shortly, the author says the elephants turn into a "sad shape." Later in the passage, the elephants "[squeeze] out what little strength they had left" to do their banzai trick.

         Lastly, the author applies symbolism to describe the change in setting. In the beginning, for example, the author says the "cherry blossoms are in full bloom." At that time the mood in the setting was cheerful. At the end of the passage, the author says, "He was still patting the tombstone tenderly as the cherry blossoms fell on the grave, like snowflakes." The cherry blossoms fall after the elephants die which shows the tension breaking after the climax. The reader should be able to tell this is symbolism because the cherry blossoms appear in in two different time periods. One in current time and the other appears in the flashback.

          In conclusion, the main focus of Yukio Tsuchiya is the setting, in order to clearly teach the readers that higher authority in command can force you to do something you don't want to. This can be related to every day life. Teachers, for example, can "command" the students to do something that the students often don't want to do. Faithful Elephants: A True Story of Animals, People, and War tells the reader that you don't always get what you want in reality.