It soon became evident that this was much more than a quirky yarn about dubious wolf sightings. Surely the woman must have mistaken a feral dog or a fox for a wolf.īut what if she wasn't mistaken? What if an extinct apex predator still lives among us? The Japanese wolf, however, officially became extinct in 1905. The episode wouldn’t have been particularly noteworthy if it had taken place in, say, Canada or China, nations with sizable gray wolf populations.
“I’m confident it was a wolf,” she insisted. Their eyes met for a few seconds before the creature disappeared into a bamboo forest. It was a cloudy winter afternoon, the middle-aged woman said, when a scrawny animal appeared by the rim of a small, empty pond in her yard. In early 2019, I stumbled upon a peculiar tale - one that took me on an unexpected journey centered around the lost beast.Ī resident of Chichibu, a mountain-ringed city some 70 kilometers northwest of Tokyo, claimed she saw a wolf. Worshipped in parts of the nation as a divine messenger and protector of farmland, it appears in numerous legends and folk tales handed down for centuries in rural communities. Yet to this day, the animal continues to transfix the minds of many. By the early 20th century, the wolf was presumed extinct. Once roaming wild across the nation’s abundant forests and mountains, the Japanese wolf’s population was decimated by disease and humans hunting them down in the name of protecting livestock. There aren’t supposed to be any native wolves left in Japan.
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