Kimio Endo, The End of Japanese Wolves. Yamatokeikokusha, 2018 (遠藤公男『ニホンオオカミの最後』山と渓谷社). In this book, the author investigates thoroughly sites of Japanese wolves, a biologically unique species which became extinct in the early 20th century.

The author has not belonged to academic worlds. The fact may be one of the main reasons why the book is so powerful and attractive: his method is beyond the border of natural and social scientific histories; and his devoted work is far from occupational calculation.

The characteristic of the book is to treat the culture and history of wolves in the Iwate region, the northern part of the mainland in Japan. The folk cultures of wolves in Kanto and Chubu (the middle parts of Japan) are relatively well-known, but the one in Iwate or Tohoku is not so.

Since the Edo era, wolves had been a popular animal to the Japanese people, and often respected as a holy one. But, after the beginning of the Meiji era, wolves had decreased very rapidly and then disappeared. There were several reasons for their extinction, as Endo refers. At first, importation of stock-farming from the Western countries facilitated policies to repel wolves as a harmful animal, with hunting or setting poisons like strychnine nitrate. Another indigenous species of wolves, Hokkaido wolves (ezo okami) also became extinct for the same reason. In addition, importation of hound dogs from the Western countries brought contagious diseases such as distemper among Japanese wolves. And there were no Japanese people who paid attention to the crisis of wolves, even though some of them respected them just as a folk religious symbol.

According to the author, only 5 whole samples of Japanese wolf exists in the world today. He visited all of them. 3 of the samples are in Japan. One of them is now preserved in Leiden; it was brought by Phillip Franz Siebold in the 19th century. Another one is possessed by the Natural History Museum in London; it is the last sample, which was collected by an American, Malcom Anderson in 1905.

You can see several good illustrations and pictures of Japanese wolves in the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_wolf

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