When air raids during the Pacific War intensified in 1944, the large carnivorous animals at Nagoya City’s Higashiyama Zoo, which had moved from Tsuruma Park to Higashiyama Park in March 1937, were culled at the request of the military, which was concerned that they might escape and harm people. Due to this culling, as well as death from sickness and starvation, the number of animals at the zoo plummeted from the over one thousand animals of three hundred different species the zoo had before the war to a little over twenty when the war ended. The works Mural Paintings for Higashiyama Zoo were proposed by a local newspaper as a way of compensating for the loneliness at the zoo that opened after the war with the elephants Erudo and Makani, and others that had somehow managed to survive, but lacking large carnivores. Ota Saburo, who hails from Aichi Prefecture and led the movement to establish the Aichi Prefectural Culture Center (Aichi-ken Bunka Kaikan), portrayed scenes of the Arctic and Antarctic, Mizutani Kiyoshi, who is from Gifu Prefecture and established a powerful painting style through his studies in India, depicted the southern tropics, and Miyamoto Saburo, who is from Ishikawa Prefecture and created numerous paintings depicting Japanese military scenes as a military artist, painted scenes of Africa. When the animals returned, the mural paintings were relocated to a facility in the city, and, in 1997, they were added to the collection of Nagoya City Art Museum. People have desired to bring together all kinds of animals since ancient times, as indicated by Noah’s Ark in the Old Testament and the enclosed parks of ancient Persia in which wild animals were kept, called pairidaeza, which is the origin of the word “paradise.” However, there is no place in the real world where you can enjoy this kind of panoramic view of so many species from different environments. Also, the history of how animal species were obtained is inseparable from the colonialism that usurped resources and wealth from other countries. What do these three mural paintings that children feasted their eyes on then tell us today, in the interim between reality and fiction?