These lions don’t just look like the kings of the jungle, but the new rulers of Earth’s surface.

Some of the most compelling views in Japan are the ones that have you feel like you’re looking through a window into the past. When you’re walking around a modern city but find a shrine or temple that’s been there for hundreds of years, you can’t help but feel the immensity of all the things that have happened between then and now.

Recently, though, Japanese Twitter user @yukiokon stumbled across a place that feels like the opposite, snapping a photo that feels like it’s from so far in the future that life on Earth has changed into something completely different than what we know today.

“Check out this picture I took” tweets @yukiokon. “It’s like after the fall of humanity, nature flourished, and a super-advanced society took the place of ours.” There’s definitely an uncanny contrast between the vast verdant foreground, with the pair of lions seemingly holding dominion over everything between where they’re lying and the base of the glittering skyscraper in the distance.

Don’t start hoarding supplies and otherwise prepping for the coming dystopia quite yet, though. You’ll be happy to hear that @yukiokon didn’t actually stumble on a portal to the future that revealed mankind’s eventual exodus into techno towers to preserve the lifestyles of the aristocracy. This is actually just the view from one specific point inside Tennoji Zoo in downtown Osaka, with the 300-meter (984-foot) Abeno Harukas, the tallest building in Japan, visible in the distance.

The zoo is located to the south of the most developed part of downtown, near the Shinsekai neighborhood. Because of that, at the point where @yukiokon took her photo the trees are tall enough to block out the rest of the skyline, leaving Abeno Harukas as the only visible man-made structure, creating the feeling that nature has reclaimed everything else.

▼ As these photos show, if you digitally remove Abeno Harukas it doesn’t look like you’re anywhere close to one of the largest cities in Japan (though the giraffes make it look even more like a scene from The Last of Us).

https://twitter.com/shushu_hime/status/1452756774138744835

Admission to Tennoji Zoo is just 500 yen (US$4.40) and it’s located within easy walking distance of the Tennoji and Dobutsuen-mae train and subway stations, making the zoo not only an easy place to fit into your Osaka itinerary, but also to run back to the big city from if you want to make sure it’s still there.

Related: Tennoji Zoo
Source: Twitter/@yukiokon via IT Media
Images: Twitter/@yukiokon
● Want to hear about SoraNews24’s latest articles as soon as they’re published? Follow us on Facebook and Twitter!