Born July 26th, 2025, Punch the Monkey began with the humblest of beginnings at the Ichikawa City Zoo. He was named after a manga artist who helped author the book Lupin the III. Shortly after birth, Punch was abandoned by his mother, which could have been due to natural factors impacting his mother, rather than his own fault. During his earliest months of life and development, he was fairly isolated from the rest of the monkeys in the zoo. However, this changed on January 19th of 2026, when he was brought back into the primary enclosure with the rest of the 60 or so other monkeys. At first, it was a struggle for Punch as this was the first monkey-to-monkey socialization he had had in his life. Workers at the zoo noticed this, but they also noticed his strong perseverance and emotional strength. To help ease him into society better, he was given an orange orangutan, Djungleskog (Plushie Brand), from Ikea.
Most people did not know of him to this point, but on February 5th, the zoo posted about his life story online and it exploded in Japan. His popularity quickly surged and it was followed by lots of Punch TikToks from visitors. These surfaced around the middle of February and had many consequences.
Firstly, the zoo that housed Punch was seeing over double the visitors at the time from the previous year. The even more impressive part is that many of the visitors were quite famous and flew to Japan just to see him, one of the most notable visitors being Lisa from Blackpink.
The second big impact was on Ikea. Within the first week of his most viral videos, most IKEA stores had sold out of his plushie. They were then being resold on platforms such as eBay for hundreds of dollars, some being listed as over 500 dollars.
Lastly, this had a huge impact on the Ichikawa Zoo. The queue for him is now turning into its own Disneyland, with people rushing in when the zoo opens. Some days, they have even had so many people show up to the zoo that they had to turn some people down from coming in. And as of now, Punch is doing very well. He is both less dependent on the plushie as a parental figure, and he is more sociable with the other monkeys of the zoo. This translates to not just monkeys, though. Sometimes being in a new place can be scary, but if you just look past the present and to the better future, you might come through better than before.
