![]() Rather, it’s beady black eyes and soft features are quite disarming. It has brown fur, pointed ears and a short, stubby tail. It’s a male specimen sourced from Iwashiro, Fukushima Prefecture. ![]() It’s much smaller than one might expect, with a shoulder height of around 46.5 centimeters - roughly the size of a Shikoku, a Japanese breed of dog. On the third floor of the museum’s Global Gallery is a stuffed specimen of the Japanese wolf - one of four mounted specimens of the creature left in the world. ![]() Modern technology and research into wolf myths and folk legends, however, are helping us better understand this rare creature and how the animal was perceived in premodern Japan.Īt the northeastern corner of Tokyo’s Ueno Park is the National Museum of Nature and Science. Contributing factors include a limited number of extant specimens, its tendency to avoid humans and the confusion over the true identity of the animals Siebold bought during his stay in Japan, which some describe as one of the greatest mysteries in the history of Japanese zoology. Once the apex predator ruling the forests and mountains of the islands of Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu, the carnivore saw its population rapidly decline in the late 19th century as the country opened its ports to the outside world and embraced industrialization.Īlthough the beast was venerated for centuries in Japan as a divine messenger and protector of farmland, much of its ecology and taxonomy have remained shrouded in secrecy. They are collectively considered the type specimen, or a specimen originally used to name a species or subspecies, of the Japanese wolf - an animal that supposedly went extinct in 1905. Today, nearly two centuries later, Siebold’s wolf and mountain dog specimens, along with another full skeleton of a dog-like animal, are stored at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the Netherlands. Siebold was subsequently expelled from the country, and left the shores of Japan in late 1829 with his extensive collection of animals, plants and books. In what became known as the Siebold Incident, the Bavaria-born naturalist was accused of spying - specifically, obtaining and trying to ship out several detailed maps of Japan, an act that was strictly forbidden under the nation’s isolationist policy. But exactly how they made their way across the sea - either dead or alive - remains a somewhat murky story, perhaps due to a major scandal that erupted in 1828 that would lead to Siebold’s banishment from the country. Siebold accumulated tens of thousands of specimens and artefacts during his initial six-year stint in Japan, and is said to have kept the wolf and mountain dog in Dejima before having their specimens sent to the Netherlands. Whoever sold him the animals, one presumes, offered them as distinct beasts known by different names. There, he purchased two live canines, describing one as an ōkame (ōkami), or wolf, and the other a jamainu (yamainu), or mountain dog. Records indicate that in 1826, en route to Edo, the capital of the Tokugawa shogunate in what is present-day Tokyo, Siebold stopped by Tennoji temple in Osaka. The title helped establish the basis for zoology in Japan. His research would eventually lead to the publication of the five-volume “Fauna Japonica,” the first book written in a European language about animal life on the archipelago. In the summer of 1823, Philipp Franz von Siebold arrived in Japan to work as a resident doctor at Dejima, an artificial island in the port of Nagasaki that was a Dutch trading post until the mid-19th century.Ī prolific collector of animals, plants, artworks and maps, the German physician and botanist introduced the latest Western medicine to Japanese students and engaged himself in the study of the nation’s fauna and flora.
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