ICHIKAWA, Japan. Punch, the Japanese macaque who spent his first months clinging to a stuffed orangutan after his mother rejected him, has a new role at 15 months old. Video released November 8 by the Ichikawa City Zoological and Botanical Garden shows the young monkey holding a smaller infant close and carefully grooming its head and neck inside the zoo’s Monkey Mountain enclosure.
The infant is another baby macaque in the troop, not his offspring. The update travelled fast for a monkey who has been famous since winter, and People noted the footage as the latest sign of his settling in. A Thursday post from the account Dexerto, captioned “Punch the viral monkey is now caring for an infant monkey of his own,” drew 23,891 views and 865 likes within hours, according to the post’s data.
His start in life was grim. Punch was born on July 26, 2025, inside a troop of roughly 50 macaques at the zoo in Chiba Prefecture, east of Tokyo, and his first-time mother, exhausted by a brutal summer heatwave, showed no interest in caring for him. Keepers stepped in within hours and began hand-rearing him. His name, Japanese outlets have traced, honors the manga artist who wrote Lupin III under the pen name Monkey Punch, a detail documented in Snopes’ fact check on the story.
Baby macaques cling to their mothers to build strength and feel safe, so the keepers improvised. Rolled-up towels came first. Then they tried a large orange DJUNGELSKOG orangutan plush from IKEA, and Punch adopted it on the spot, dragging it everywhere and hugging it after hard encounters with the troop. Keeper Kosuke Shikano explained the choice to Reuters: “This stuffed animal has relatively long hair and several easy places to hold.” Fans nicknamed the toy Ora-Mama.
The public discovered him in February, when the zoo posted his backstory and the images spread under the hashtag #HangInTherePunch. About 9,600 visitors poured in over one weekend. The zoo’s February attendance finished near 47,000, more than double the previous year, CNN reported. The plush sold out in IKEA stores across multiple countries, and the retailer’s Japan president handed over boxes of replacement orangutans at the zoo, NBC News reported. It was a strange commercial afterlife for a company already known for odd viral turns, including the paid job it once posted inside Roblox.
Reintegration into the troop began in January, and it was not gentle. Older macaques scolded him, chased him off and gave him the cold shoulder, and clips of those moments circulated as bullying. The zoo pushed back in a statement: “Even though Punch gets scolded, he also possesses very strong mental resilience and recovers quickly. The fact that he repeatedly receives the cold shoulder and exclusion from group members after trying to communicate with various monkeys is not something to simply feel sorry about.” The BBC later filmed the turn, an adult macaque embracing him and Punch grooming others, a core part of how macaques socialize.
The fame kept compounding. Blackpink’s Lisa visited in March and posted her own orangutan plush. Google added a monkey animation to searches for his name. Tron founder Justin Sun and the HTX exchange donated 100,000 dollars to his care, and a stage musical about him premiered in Toronto in June, his Wikipedia page records. About 2,500 birthday cards from Japan, the United States, Hong Kong and Taiwan arrived for his first birthday in July, and zoo head Takashi Yasunaga told the BBC, “Every card is written from the heart.” Donations passed 43 million yen by spring, stretched past 58 million by mid-July and paid for a new air-conditioning system.
Not all of the attention was kind. In May, two American influencers were arrested after one climbed into Punch’s enclosure in a smiley-face costume to promote a cryptocurrency while the other filmed, a stunt that scattered the troop and led the zoo to install intrusion nets. A photo book chronicling his growth followed in October, according to the Mainichi Shimbun. Internet primate mania has run hot all year, from Moo Deng’s hippos to the orangutan encounter that left Duke Dennis stunned. Punch’s fame has outlasted all of it.
The zoo frames the new video the same way it has framed every update, as proof of steady work rather than miracle. Keepers watch the troop daily, adjust feeding to the season and treat the animals’ conditions as day-to-day. “Punch is able to live so healthily thanks to the care our keepers provide,” the zoo wrote with the footage, asking supporters to cheer the staff alongside the monkey.
The arc of the footage is hard to miss. A hand-raised infant who once hugged a plush substitute for his mother now gathers a smaller one close and grooms it, exactly the affiliative behavior his keepers spent a year nudging him toward. The toy mostly stays behind these days. The troop does not.
