Howling Like The Japanese Wolf

Here's an interesting story about the boy who cried wolf - except that this time he is searching - for 40 years now - for a wolf long thought extinct in Japan.

For 40 years! Wow! While I am unsure if he has gathered any solid evidence to make his search more palpable, Yagi Hiroshi (surname first) is tenacious.

I mean the last official capture of one of these creatures was back in 1905 when hunters killed one in Higashi-Yoshino in Nara-ken (Nara Prefecture), and no one has seen one - not even the hairs of its chinny-chin-chin - in all that time.

So... what made Yagi think the Honshu Wolf (also known as the Japanese Wolf or Nihon Ōkami was still alive?

A howling he heard when he was 19-years-old in a beech wood forest on Mount Naeba, a volcano on the border of Nagano and Niigata prefectures in central Honshū, Japan situated about 200 kilometers from Tokyo.

Yagi Hiroshi

I think I am impressed by Yagi... because he has found something he truly believes in and is willing to dedicate his life to it.

The Japanese Wolf does not, in my opinion, look much like the typical wolf I think of, that are in the wilds of Canada or in the cartoons I adore. This Japanese wolf looks like a fox, as you can see from the Wikipedia image photographed by Momotarou2012. 

If you look at the photo of the taxidermied Japanese Wolf, it has a pointy face and a curled tail tip, and the black 'socks' that sure make it look fox-like. They are 35-inches (89-centimeters) long and about 12-inches (30-centimeters) high at the shoulder and are the smallest known sub-species of the Grey Wolf.

As an extinct species, the Japanese wolf is on the Japanese Red List of the Environment Ministry.

The Japanese Wolf population took its first major hit when a rabies outbreak decimated it in 1732.

Diet-wise, the creature ate animals larger than it like deer and wild boars, as well as rodents and rabbits - hares, actually, which made it something the local Japanese farmer actually appreciated because it helped reduce farm pests.

In fact, the Japanese Wolf is/was thought of kindly by many regions of farmers thanks to its ability to help control deer and boar and others which would eat their crops. So much so, that it was worshiped as a guardian god.

But, by the time the Meiji-era came about in 1868, the Japanese government said the Japanese wolf was a threat to livestock and ordered it exterminated as another pest. The Japanese people's expansion into the forest areas also so its habitat affected.

And so... by 1905, the last Japanese wolf was gone.

But, maybe there's a small enclave out there. That's what Yagi hopes for. It would be a shame to have to come to grips with yet another animal being wiped from the face of the Earth just to have us dumb humans put up another house.

So... in Yagi's travels, he decided to visit an area of Japan where there are a lot of shrines to the Japanese wolf... and then went searching.

And... back in October of 1996, Yagi this photograph below:

This wolf is alive and walking about. It doesn't have the exact markings of the wolf specimen in the photo at the top... but it's close.

A zootaxy expert (someone who classifies animals) has said that it "is possibly a surviving descendent of the Japanese wolf."

The image was taken in the Okuchichibu Mountains, a huge range of mountains that covers the western part of Tokyo, the western part of Saitama Prefecture, the southwestern part of Gunma Prefecture, the southeastern part of Nagano Prefecture, the northern part of Yamanashi Prefecture.

Here's a Japanese-language YOUTUBE Video.

Since then, Yagi says there are 10 or so sightings of a Japanese Wolf every year, but even he admits he must take such data with a grain of salt.

He still hasn't found definitive proof that the Japanese Wolf is still alive, but that photo and others he took during that outing in 1996 have at least given him - and us stupid humans - hope.

I'll take that for now.

Cheers,
Andrew Joseph