BEIJING — When all four of the pandas at Adventure World amusement park in Shirahama, Japan, were sent back to China, the local community was overwhelmed with a sense of “panda loss.”
It was late June when the pandas left the park in Wakayama prefecture, heading home to the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding in China’s southwestern province of Sichuan. About a week before the pandas returned, the facility was bustling with tourists.