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Japan conjures images of electronic gadgets, fast-moving cars, rush hour in Tokyo, and a host of other objects that signify its standing as a modern, well-developed member of the comity of nations. These days, the East Asian powerhouse is also in the news for its shrinking and ageing population and worries about its future. But plucky as the Japanese are, one is sure they would find a solution to that as well.
However, Japan was not always the modern landscape that it is assumed to be. One visit to its rugged countryside is all it takes to transport one to an older and very different nation.
“In Japan mountains are dangerous, frightening places that are associated with death, not only as sites of physical burial but also as the abode of the spirits of the dead. There is a large body of Japanese folklore featuring encounters in the mountains with ghosts and a range of other, often malevolent, spirits,” John Knight wrote in his 1997 paper On the Extinction of the Japanese Wolf.
In these mountains or yama, roam wild animals which add to their sense of foreboding remoteness.
“Wild animals, such as bears, feral dogs, and vipers, are a further source of perceived danger to humans. The boundary between wild animals and spirits in the yama is often blurred on account of the theriomorphic character of the spirits. Many forest animals, particularly remote-dwelling ones, are associated with the yama no kami,” wrote Knight.
The yama no kami are mountain spirits in Japanese folklore.
One of the animals that used to be found in the mountains of Japan’s main island of Honshu — the country is an archipelago or group of islands, with four ‘Home Islands’ namely Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu and Shikoku forming its core — is long gone. But so pervasive has its influence been that it still lingers on: The Japanese wolf or Nihon Okami.
To this day, the Japanese wolf raises a lot of questions. Was it really a true wolf? Or was it a dog of the mountains?
This wolf stood just over one foot at the shoulder. “It has long been recognized as significantly different from other wolves, even to the point where its very status as a wolf has been called into question,” Knight noted.
A study published in Nature Communications in February this year titled Japanese wolves are most closely related to dogs and share DNA with East Eurasian dogs showed that the Japanese wolf was closest to the domestic dog and could have been part of the process by which wild wolves became domestic dogs and humans’ best friends.
“Our results support the hypothesis that the modern dog lineage was domesticated from an extinct population of gray wolves, and the Japanese wolf is the closest to this now-extinct gray wolf population,” the authors wrote.
Further analysis of the genome of the Japanese wolf and ancient dog genomes, in particular from East Eurasia, will shed further light on the origins of dog domestication, they added.
Whatever it was, one thing about the okami is clear as per Japanese folklore — it was a benign animal and a friend of people, especially those residing in Honshu’s mountains.
Various Japanese folktales tell of how the okami protects the vulnerable, whether they are travelers lost in the montains at night, the poor or even bring up human children just like in the case of Rome’s founding legend.
Knight explains why this image of the Japanese wolf differs vastly from that of its counterparts in Europe and North America. The primary reason is the wolf in Japan was considered a friend of farmers and rural mountain folk.
“A common reason given for the positive view of the wolf in Japan is that, far from being a threat to village livelihoods, it helped to protect them from farm-raiding forest animals such as wild boar, deer, and hares. The autumn incursions of the wild boar have long been a major source of anxiety among upland farmers on account of the devastation the animals can cause to maturing crops,” he writes.
Wolves, as per Knight, were “another form of farm protection, as they mitigated losses by keeping down wild boar numbers”.
“In this way, the wolf played the role of guardian of the fields and therefore of village livelihoods. The wolf was a benign animal because of this perceived symbiotic relationship with mankind,” he writes.
But all that was about to change. From the late 16th century onwards, forests were cut in large numbers in Japan to fuel urban development.
This, and the development of timber plantations, meant that deer numbers fell. In turn, the wolf turned to human settlements for food.
Moreover, farming shifted from the mountains towards the reclaimed land of river valleys. “Often this meant that fields, though originally adjacent to, if not actually within, the mountain forests, were later separated from the forest by the village itself,” writes Knight.
The wolf was no longer required now as a protective animal of mountain villages. Rather, a new relationship developed between the wolf and the village: people now saw it as a predator.
The Meiji Period of Japanese history saw rapid industrialisation. The old, traditional Japan was lost forever. And with it, the wolf too was hunted to extinction.
However, to this day, many Japanese believe the okami is still alive and roaming the mountains. Every now and then, there are reports in Japanese media of ‘sightings’ of wolves in some remote mountainous part of Honshu.
All this has led to raising the mystique of the animal even more than before.
Knight notes that “for some writers the wolf is a symbol of an earlier Japanese relationship to nature lost upon modernization”.
“…the death of the last recorded Japanese wolf in Yoshino in 1905 is annually remembered in the form of a (requiem) ceremony carried out in the local temple at the time of the Bon midsummer festival. Thus the existence of wolf killing in Japan seems to reinforce, not undermine, the cultural status of the wolf as an animal that should not be killed,” he wrote.
To this day, Japan reveres its wolves, most famously in the Mitsumine Shrine near the city of Chichibu, just northwest of Tokyo.
In the backdrop of the ‘wolf frenzy’ due to the Bahraich wolf attacks in Uttar Pradesh, one might remember that the animal has not always had negative interactions with humans. Some of them have been positive too. Like in Japan.