Mayama Kangaroo is a mammal-type cryptid reported from the Mayama mountain area in Osaki, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan. This is one of many cases of Phantom Kangaroo reported around the world.
Description[]
It appears to be a kangaroo itself and is reported to be between 1 and 1.5 metres long. There are testimonies that it was a parent and child kangaroo, and there are said to be at least two or more of them.
Sightings[]
Japanese news website J-CAST interviewed random passers-by in the area and found 20 witnesses.
The sightings reportedly began in 2002 or 2003. However, no details are known of these early sightings.
In late 2009, kangaroo sightings became more frequent in the area. However, as many sightings are verbally described, there are few reports presented on the internet or in books.
On 24 October, a local housewife named Kimiko Kasamori saw a kangaroo-like creature while driving to pick up her primary school son, who is in the kendo club, at night. It was sitting on the side of the road, light beige in colour and about as long as the back of a light truck. The creature did not run away when she shone her car lights on it.
On 3 December of the same year, a news programme reported the excrement of a kangaroo-like creature and evidence that it had eaten clover.
In mid-December, a local man in his 40s witnessed the leaping creature while jogging.
On 27 December, Kimiko Kasamori and her husband Kenichi, who had seen kangaroos in October, found footprints on the snow cover that appeared to belong to kangaroos. They photographed the footprints and showed them to the zoo's kangaroo keeper, who replied that he was not sure about the owner of the footprints.
Explanations[]
Kangaroos are legally allowed to be kept in Japan, but they are rarely distributed in the country normally, so they need to be imported by individuals and are extremely expensive, and it is unlikely that individuals in the area kept more than one kangaroo. It is also unlikely that such a creature, which is not easy to obtain, would be managed in such a sloppy manner that it would escape. It is therefore not at all clear why the kangaroos were spotted on Mayama Mountain.