Khaberni - He sits on the edge of his cage, clutching his doll with both hands, as if he knows the world is watching him, he is "Bancho-kun", the 6-month-old Japanese macaque monkey, who did nothing exceptional except cling to what compensates for a mother he never knew the warmth of.
This simplicity alone was enough to sweep his images from platforms from Tokyo to New York, from Europe to the Middle East, turning a small zoo in Chiba Prefecture, Japan, into a destination with queues never seen before.
From deprivation to the embrace of the doll
Bancho was born on July 26, 2025, weighing 500 grams. His mother, experiencing motherhood for the first time, was exhausted by the summer heat and neglected him from the first moments.
The zookeepers intervened immediately, beginning to hand-raise him, deliberately nurturing him close to the scents and sounds of other monkeys in preparation for his eventual reintroduction.
However, macaque infants need to cling to their mothers' fur from their first hours; this contact provides them with emotional security and builds their muscle strength together. When Bancho was deprived of this, the keepers tried several alternatives: wrapped towels and various dolls, but Bancho found his choice in a large-sized "orangutan" doll; its fur was easy to grasp, and its features resembled a monkey's face.
Chikano - one of the keepers taking care of Bancho - said it became an "alternative mother" that the little one returns to when the keepers leave in the evening.
Cautious progress and anticipating hearts
On January 19, 2026, Bancho officially moved to the monkey cage housing 56 monkeys of the same species, although integration was not easy; the adults received him reservedly, and he was sometimes intimidated, never leaving his doll for a moment.
But his weight grew from 500 grams to about 2 kilograms, and he began increasingly interacting with the group members, and his keeper noticed that he "recovers quickly even when punished by the older monkeys," describing him as "psychologically strong.".
The digital spread and the phenomenon "Cheer up Bancho"
On February 5, 2026, the zoo posted the first official introduction of Bancho on platform "X", and the post was shared more than 8,000 times within hours.
The next day, a Japanese hashtag titled "#Cheer-up-Bancho" appeared, and by the 13th of the same month, it had accumulated 37,000 posts and reshares, with one user writing: "Scrolling through this hashtag and crying has become a daily ritual," and another saying: "My heart feels pure every time I see him.".
The story of "Bancho" transformed from just sad snapshots of a monkey deprived of affection, clinging to his huggable doll, into a global phenomenon that crossed the borders of Japan and spread across all social media platforms, with users from east to west expressing their full sympathy for the animal whose features bore the terror carved by the harshness of abandonment.
It is noteworthy that this interaction was not merely emotional; it turned into tangible field attendance, where visitors queued up at Ishikawa Zoo in unprecedented lines, forcing officials to issue an official apology for the entry delays, affirming that what they witnessed "had never happened before in the history of the zoo.".
The story reflects a poignant contradiction between the harshness of nature represented in the mother's rejection, and the "humanity" of human intervention, which relied on an inanimate object to give a living creature the ability to continue, becoming a gradual journey from complete dependence on a stuffed pillow to learning the language of the herd and practicing life as a real monkey.