Is The Japanese Wolf Still Alive?

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]It was then when I heard a howl.

[00:00:03]I knew that the Japanese wolf had been declared extinct since the Meiji era, but I thought an animal that doesn't exist can't howl.

[00:00:13]>> [music] [music] >> Two wolves once prowled the mountains and forests of Japan. They were revered as deities and respected as protectors of travelers and fields until forces from outside the islands changed [music] everything. Now, one wolf is gone for good, while the other, even though it's likely extinct, is still being hunted.

[00:00:46]Between the Japanese islands of Hokkaido in the north and Honshu in the south runs the Tsugaru Strait, a stretch of water that connects the Sea of Japan to the Pacific Ocean. It doesn't look like much on a map, measuring only 19 km across, but its real power lies in how it split the islands into two worlds.

[00:01:06]It's what scientists call a biogeographic boundary, [music] an invisible line that divides biological communities. This one's often called Blakiston's Line after the English naturalist who first wrote about it. And on either side of the strait lived wolves. Now, despite their close proximity, these weren't just two populations of the same wolf torn apart by some seismic catastrophe. They were two different subspecies of gray wolves, each with their own distinct origin, but with some striking parallels in how they were seen and how they met their ends.

[00:01:39]To the north of the strait lived the Ezo or Hokkaido wolf, [music] and to the south lived the Japanese or Honshu wolf.

[00:01:46]The Hokkaido wolves were relative newcomers, probably crossing over from northern Asia via a land bridge with Sakhalin Island sometime between about 14,000 and 10,000 years ago. They were about the same size as North American gray wolves and were more closely related to those wolves than they were to the wolves south [music] of the strait. The wolves to the south, the Honshu wolves, came from an older lineage. They lived on the southern Japanese islands of Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu for somewhere between 25,000 and 125,000 years. And like the Hokkaido wolves, they'd originally come from the Asian mainland, but their crossing probably came by way of the Korean peninsula. Their longer tenure on the islands meant that they'd gotten a little weird, as mammals on islands often do. This is another biogeographic rule, usually called the island rule. In its most general form, it says that big mammals that colonize islands tend to shrink, while small mammals become giant. And the Honshu wolves fit that pattern. They were smaller than the gray wolves on the Asian mainland and Hokkaido and most other gray wolf subspecies globally. But, there was one thing that the wolves on either side of the strait had in common. They were revered by the people they lived alongside. To the Ainu, the indigenous people of Hokkaido, the wolf was seen as the spirit deity Horkew Kamuy, the howling god. A white wolf even featured in some of their regional creation myths as the mate of a goddess. Their offspring were the ancestors of the Ainu. And many people of the southern islands, the wolf was Okuchi no Makami, the large-mouthed pure god. Wolves were venerated by farmers as defenders of their fields, preying upon the deer and wild boar that ate [music] their grain.

[00:03:30]They were also immortalized in folklore as protectors of travelers in the mountains, an identity that lives on in the scientific species name given to the Honshu wolf, Canis lupus hodophilax, which means guardian of the way. And their images were made into talismans for protection against things like fire and disease etched into shrines, like the one at Mitsumine, which was [music] famous as a site of wolf worship. This relatively peaceful coexistence of wolves and people continued until the early 18th century, [music] at least in the southern islands. Now, that's not to say they had never been in conflict before. For example, in places where horse breeding was an important part of the local economy, like Morioka domain, wolves had killed horses and been hunted in the past. [music] Domain lords had even paid bounties to wolf hunters for successful kills. But, the appearance of so-called mad wolves and an increase in wolf attacks starting in the 1740s and 1750s were a real turning point in how they were seen and dealt with. Like the ancestors of the wolves and infected, rabies had come to the islands from somewhere else. The first case of rabies was reported in a dog in 1732 in Nagasaki, the only place with a port that allowed access to the rest of the world during the period from 1639 to 1854. From there, it reached the northern tip of Honshu in 29 years. One writer living at the time attributed these attacks to the spread of canine poisons that drove any animal or human who came into contact with them mad.

[00:05:03]Another, writing in the early 1800s, suggested that the wolves transmitted their madness through their poison fangs. And while it's not literally a poison, you could say that rabies poisoned the relationship between people and the Honshu wolves. The wolf hunts undertaken by necessity in the past became ritualized and regular, sometimes with hundreds of people participating.

[00:05:26]These large-scale hunts were not always successful, but they reflected a changing attitude towards wolves when they became enshrined in national policy after the Meiji restoration of 1868, >> [music] >> that of extermination. Rabies was an outside force that transformed once beneficial guardians of crops into monsters to be hunted down and killed.

[00:05:47]And unlike the wolves that had infected on Honshu, rabies did manage to cross the barrier of the Tsugaru Strait. But, it wasn't the poison responsible for the disappearance of the wolves on Hokkaido.

[00:05:58]For the Ezo wolves, [music] it was literal poison that contributed to their extinction, specifically strychnine.

[00:06:04]And, its use came into fashion on Hokkaido through [music] the influence of another outside force. An American rancher named Edwin Dun, brought in to [music] advise the Meiji government on modernizing the Japanese livestock industry. The Meiji Restoration of 1868 ended samurai rule in Japan, replacing it with a more centralized government that welcomed and sought to incorporate knowledge from the outside world.

[00:06:27][music] On Hokkaido, that took the form of industrial ranching and experimental farms. [music] And, the Niikappu Horse Ranch, in particular, had a wolf problem. In the 1870s, the government office tasked with exploiting the resources of Hokkaido >> [music] >> in the name of development, started harvesting the island's deer much more intensively than before. This, coupled with extremely harsh winters in 1878 and 1879, and the fact that the ranch was located in the southeastern part of the island, created a perfect storm for wolf attacks. Historically, deer would migrate to this area in the winter to escape the snow that blanketed the western part of Hokkaido, and the wolves would follow. With no deer left to hunt, they turned to the horses at Niikappu.

[00:07:11]And, Edwin Dun's solution to this problem was strychnine. Enough to poison every living thing on the island. He and his men dropped chunks of poisoned meat around the ranch and laced any dead horses they found with it, as well. And, it worked. Along with the bounty system, modeled on Europe and the United States, that the government office implemented that paid hunters for dead wolves. From 1878 to 1881, 294 wolf bounties were paid. And, by around 1889, just 16 years after Edwin Dun arrived, the Hokkaido wolf was extinct. [music] And in doing research for this episode, we couldn't find any mention of its endling. [music] It's possible that a record of it exists in an archive somewhere, as a final bounty paid to a hunter working as part of the wolf extermination strategy, but we can't be sure. What is certain though is that there was an Ezo wolf endling.

[00:08:08]At some point, every extinction has one.

[00:08:10]But what about their southern cousin, the Honshu wolf? As the story goes, the last known Honshu wolf was killed in late January of 1905 in Nara Prefecture.

[00:08:20]Honshu wolves were rare by that point.

[00:08:23]Their numbers decimated by epizootics of rabies and distemper, along with hunting and deforestation. [music] This young male was the last of its kind to be collected, which of course doesn't mean he was the true endling, but his is the story that's been recorded. His body was sold by three hunters to an American zoologist who was on an expedition to collect animal specimens for the London Zoological Society. Today, his skin and skull reside in the Natural History Museum in London, one of just nine known pelts left from this subspecies. But, was he really the endling?

[00:08:58]Is the Japanese wolf actually gone? In the almost immediate aftermath of that 1905 hunt, there were already claims that the Honshu wolf was still around.

[00:09:08]These range from reported sightings as far back as 1908 to photographs of a mysterious canid from 1996 to dashcam footage from 2019. And this isn't uncommon when an animal is thought to be extinct, especially if they range over large areas or in challenging terrain, or if we don't want them to be extinct out of grief or guilt or nostalgia.

[00:09:31]There's even a crew of dedicated people who have been camera trapping mountain trails on Honshu for years, meticulously combing through their footage in search of potential remaining wolves. They're led by Hiroshi Yagi, a man who has believed in the continued existence of the Japanese wolf since he heard a series of howls in the mountains late at night way back in 1969. He's also the one who took the photos in 1996, getting close enough to offer the animal a rice cracker. And you might think that 19 pictures shot at relatively close range would be enough to confirm exactly [music] what kind of animal the subject was, but unfortunately, that wasn't the case. Of all the experts Yagi sent the photos to, only one was willing to say it might be a surviving wolf. Another tantalizing piece of potential evidence emerged from one of those camera trap recordings in 2018, a howl.

[00:10:29]According to the Japan Acoustics Lab in Tokyo, it was nearly [music] identical in fundamental frequency to a recording of a timber wolf howl. So, perhaps there's a reason for Yagi and his colleagues to believe the Japanese wolf still exists. Meanwhile, others have chosen to focus on a different way that wolves could return to Japan, reintroduction. Some researchers support the idea of importing wolves to Japan to restore ecological balance to its forests, which are overrun with deer and boar. These wild ungulates have caused significant damage to crops and tree seedlings, including within the boundaries of many national parks. And the researchers think that bringing back wolves would be a natural way to cut down their numbers. If the reintroduction plan were to go forward, it would essentially repeat the history of wolves in Japan, from their origins to their previous perceived role. For instance, the Japan Wolf Association suggests sourcing wolves from China for the southern islands [music] and from Siberia for Hokkaido, which would recreate the dividing effect of Blakiston's Line and the Tsugaru Strait.

[00:11:32]But would these wolves once again become the guardians of fields and crops they were seen as in the pre-Meiji period? Or would bring them back just restart the cycle of human-wildlife conflict that led to their extinction? Rabies has been eradicated in Japan, but the fear of wolf attacks lives on, and Japan has changed a lot over the last 120 years.

[00:11:53]But, what is a century compared to the at least 20,000 years that people have lived on Hokkaido and the 38,000 years or more that they've lived on the southern islands. And while there's a range of dates for when both types of wolves first arrived in Japan, some of them would place their arrival after that of people, which means learning to live with wolves newly arrived on the landscape was possible once, so maybe it wouldn't be impossible to do it again.

[00:12:28]This was by far the most requested Endlings merch item, so we added it to the Bizarre Beasts store. I'm talking about our Endlings logo pin, inspired by the first Endling we covered on the show. It features Martha, the last [music] passenger pigeon, perched on top of an hourglass because all of the species we cover are at or [music] near extinction and time is running out. This pin is available now with [music] a little shine and glitter to remind us that it's a celebration of these great species. Support the show by ordering one at bizarrebizarrebeasts.com.

[00:13:00]Time is of the essence.

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