A taxidermy of a Japanese wolf stored at the University of Tokyo's Faculty of Agriculture
One of the 19 photos taken by Hiroshi Yagi in 1996, 91 years after the animal's supposed extinction. The photo depicts a wolf or wolf-dog hybrid on a roadside in Chichibu, Japan.
The Japanese Wolf (Canis lupus hodophilax) is a dwarf subspecies of Grey Wolf just over a foot tall and deemed extinct since 1905 due to a rabies epidemic and a wolf killing policy introduced by Emperor Meiji. It is also known by the name Honshu Wolf and may occasionally be referred to as Okami, Yamainu, Okuri-inu and more. The wolf is often described as having short legs, fur and ears, a black tip on its tail and a sloped face. This wolf is not to be confused with the Hokkaido wolf (Canis lupus hattai), an extinct wolf subspecies found only in Hokkaido.
Sightings[]
“It looked familiar, but I couldn’t immediately place it. The creature walked across the road in front of me. Then it dawned on me that this could be it — I could have found what I’d spent decades searching for.” [1]
Reports of small wolf-like canids that were thought to be extinct came out of the Chichibu district of Japan in 1998. At least seventy people reported wolf howls in 1994, and there have been at least twenty-six claims of wolves seen from 1908 to 1978, all in the Aomori and Oita regions in northernmost Japan, not to mention prints, howls and scat. Several sightings have also been made on the Kii peninsula. In 1936 a man in Hongu supposedly captured a wolf pup, but released it in case a parent attempted to retrieve it. In 1996, Hiroshi Yagi, someone who's spent most of his life searching for the wolves, encountered a wolf-like animal on a mountain road in Chichibu late at night. He took 19 photos in total of the animal before it walked away into the brush. One of these photos can be seen on the right of this page. Attempts to record wolves howling, by playing wolf howls to prompt them in 1995 were unsuccessful. However, trail cam footage of spooked deer running with wolf howls in the background was recorded by Yagi in 2018. The Youtube upload can be found by pressing this reference [2]. Hiroshi Yagi now runs a non-profit organisation aimed at rediscovering the wolves. Many articles have been written about these wolves which can be easily accessed online.
Gallery[]
One of Hiroshi Yagi's photos