Faithful Elephants by Yukio Tschiya

       "Faithful Elephants" by Yukio Tschiya zooms in on just one of the horrible anecdotes of Word War 2. The picture book is about a zoo in Japan, caught in between a time in Japan where they get bombed almost every night. We learn that the army is forcing the zoo to kill all dangerous animals, including the elephants must be killed because of the war. The book begins on a spring day in the Ueno Zoo, where a zoo keeper looking at the elephants begins to tell us a story about the Elephants from years ago. The story then becomes in the point of view of someone during the war. As the story goes on, the first elephant dies and afterwards the 2 others do as well. Even though it is just a childrens picture book, the author is trying to send a ver obvious and important message and i think the story indicates it very well.
   I think that even though "Faithful Elephants" is very specific to one story, it is showing a much bigger picture. I think that Tschiya is trying to convince readers at a young age that war is horrible and incredibly destructive. The author teaches young readers this by using Elephants, a friendly animal that most people have sympathy for and showing the terrible experience they had to endure starving to death instead of talking about the holocaust and all the people that lost their lives in world war two. Yukio includes very depressing and heartbreaking details, even putting you in the elephants shoes. At one point tin the story, when the elephants try to get noticed by the keepers by doing their banzai trick, the author writes"surely their friend would reward them with food and water like he used to do.", putting you in perspective of the elephants. The author also included how the people at the zoo specifically one zoo keeper there were also suffering, watching as their elephants that he "loved as if they were his own children" slowly starved to death, the elephants becoming weaker and weaker by the day. When the elephants finaly died, the zoo keeper yelled "the elephants are dead! theyre dead!" as he ran into the office stomping his fists on the table in frustration. I think Yukio put such upsetting details in like this to really show readers how difficult the war was on both the elephants and the zoo keepers. Yukio has a very obvious opinion on wars. After the elephants die, the zoo keepers put their fists up in the air and yell "stop the war! stop the war! stop all wars!" Tschyia could not have a more evident stance on the war, and decided to put it towards the end of the story to conclude the lesson of the book. Overall, I think the narrative expresses how bad war is, and that it is a Person Vs. Society , showing that the enemy is obviously the army and just wars in general.