The Lost Wolves of Japan (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books)

We don’t always get the book we expect. I expected Walker’s book to be something like the 1880 classic “British Animals Extinct Within Historic Times”, in which J. E. Harting bemoans the disappearance “beyond recall” of wild boars, bears, and wolves. (He was wrong: wild boars are back in Great Britain, and there is talk of reintroducing the wolf.) In lively writing Harting describes the animals, their range and habits, humans’ wars against them, and accounts of both real and legendary last individuals. He never blames anyone but the British for wiping out their large animals.Walker takes a different tack. Reading like a 1993 term paper for an environmental studies class, blame for the demise of Japanese wolves is laid almost entirely on the West. This relies on the easy answer that modern humans – and especially modern humans viewed as “technological” – are solely responsible for extinctions and other environmental catastrophes. And yet we know that pre-industrial societies, especially on islands, destroyed countless species. Island-like Australia began loosing its large animals as soon as humans arrived 50,000 years ago; animals on Hawaii, New Zealand, and other Pacific Islands were driven to extinction by Polynesians, Melanesians, and other peoples; most large British animals were wiped out during the Neolithic Era, and nearly all of the rest before the Middle Ages had passed.Comparing Britain and Japan would be interesting – the British, living on an archipelago slightly smaller than Japan, and with less rugged terrain, were able to wipe out their wolves more than a century before the Japanese managed to kill off theirs. But Walker makes no mention of any other extinctions, and again takes the easy route of complaining about the “progress” that took Japan’s top predators. In fact, wolves weren’t Japan’s top predators – tigers and leopards were. And today, well into the 21st Century, tigers and leopards persist almost with sight of Hokkaido, just across the Sea of Japan in Russia. Why don’t they live in Japan? They don’t live in Japan because the early Japanese, or more likely the ancestors of the Ainu, either directly or indirectly killed every last one. That was long before the utilization of anti-predator strychnine and industrial cattle ranching.Walker almost addresses the dearth of wildness in pre-industrial Japan. He speculates that Japan’s crows – the large-billed crow and the carrion crow – might have followed wolf packs, or led them to their prey. Bernd Heinrich has shown how ravens might do that, and how there might be something to the traditional association between ravens and wolves. But that association has never been attributed to smaller crows, and Walker’s speculation seems wishful thinking. Regardless, his musings acknowledge that ravens are rare in Japan, even though they are plentiful just to the north, and in relative wilderness of Asia, Africa, and North America that lie in latitudes far south of Japan’s. As with the tiger and leopard there seems to be no reason for ravens not to live in Japan, other than a lack of wild spaces and uninviting humans.Another suggestion of a denuded, pre-industrial Japan is Walker’s search for the true identity of the Japanese wolf – was it a feral dog? But here again the analysis is irksome and does nothing to convince the reader. The best example in history of a dog that took on a truly wild state is the Australian dingo. But the dingo is mentioned only once, in passing.Much of the book is devoted to the Japanese reverence for the wolf, which also paints a strange picture. The famously insular Japanese abandoned a sacred animal simply because the West didn’t care for wolves? Why didn’t they also adopt Christianity, if they were so bent on imitating the West? Yes, the Japanese adopted Western ways and technology during the Meiji era, but there is no doubt that they picked and chose what they thought appropriate.And here again we can compare environmental ideals in Japan and the West. While the simplistic take is that the West is single-handedly destroying the planet, in the case of preserving mega fauna – and in particular predators – the West actually seems ahead. Wolves are returning to parts of Europe where they’d been extinct for centuries. Wolves have been reintroduced to the American West and even into North Carolina. Yes, these reintroductions are opposed by many, but significant enthusiasm for wolves among the entire population has made the reintroductions possible. And the century-long rural depopulation that came with industrial agriculture and industrial ranching provided enough open space.Japan is also experiencing rural depopulation. The Japanese could reintroduce wolves any time they want, and yet they haven’t bothered. If their reverence for nature is so great, why not take it a step further, and reintroduce globally threatened tigers and leopards? Again, it seems the Japanese are essentially shrugging at the loss of large animals, and it’s hard to imagine that only a few generations ago they thought any differently.This is not to single out the Japanese as any more anti-environment than most societies throughout history, but it shows that the simplistic tale of the West as the sole enemy of the planet is not backed up by facts. Unfortunately, it seems that “The Lost Wolves of Japan” relies on this discredited idea.

If you are interested in wolves, the mechanics of extinction, or the relationship of the Japanese people to the environment, this is a fascinating read. The spiritual and cultural relationship between the Japanese wolf and the Japanese people is explored in this well-written volume. Illustrations enhance the text, and the author's own experiences with wolves in the American west are relevant and provide a contrast to his experiences researching the history of the disappearance of wolves and wild dogs in Japan.

Great book. It places a cultural study of Japanese wolves in a carefully considered historical context from which the reader is allowed to draw some significant concerns about America's own treatment of wolves and exactly what that treatment implies about our national character (or lack of character) and our entire relationship with nature since our arrival on this continent. It is an informative and intriguing read even for those who don't think about the plight of wolves very often.

I have come across several scholars accrediting the Ainu with a wolf ancestor. While the intensive and extensive work by Bachelor (1901) in my mind debunked the myth, what we know for certain is that it first appeared in Murakami’s Curious Sights of Ezo Island (1799) as a painting. No doubt the painter of Ainu-e was familiar with the Ainu affection for the animal, a taboo on killing it and a recognition they had of sharing hunting grounds. However, as Bachelor points out early in his work on myth and folklore, none of his Ainu informants thought it credible. Also when the writer of “The Lost Wolves of Japan, says the Ainu “believed that their people were born from the union of a wolflike canine and a goddess.” He could not have raised doubts any stronger. He goes on the say the Ainu sacrificed wolves; but killing wolves was most definitely taboo for the Ainu. These claims are also unreferenced. The first person to disseminate this myth to a western audience was probably Isabella Bird 1890s who didn’t speak Ainu and heard it from her Japanese guide. He clearly got it from Murakami’s work. It’s unfortunate this myth appears in this first chapter when my research shows it was made up by the ruling Matsumae clan.

I really wanted to like this book and once I got my hands on it, was deeply interested, as far as finishing the preface. In that he gives wolves what is sometimes called "agency", which means the animals have some power to resist being victims of one or another human schemes. Then I got to the book main text and it became a disappointment.The book is more about Japanese ideas about wolves that about the wolves themselves. These views of wolves changed from seeing them as semi-sacred to threats to prosperity. This is connected to the development of the northern island of Hokkaido, still something of a frontier in the 1800s, and wolves would be a threat to farmers' livestock (Hokkaido was less densely settled and cattle could be profitably raised). Wolves in Hokkaido were not extirpated until the 1920s. The taxonomy appears to be somewhat ragged, in that it is not clear if these were really wolves, or wolf-dog hybrids.

Walker's exhaustive coverage of wolves in Japan, with the wolf situation of the US sprinkled in for good measure, runs a little dry but is very, VERY informative. A perfect read if you want to find out how wolves went from worshipped deities to hunted villains to extinction.

unusual and interesting

Splendido libro. Brett L. Walker racconta la tragica storia del lupo. Anticamente venerato come Ōguchi no Magami, Dio Puro dalla Grande Bocca, considerato dagli agricoltori simbolo di fertilità oltre che aiuto contro le razzie di cervi e cinghiali, onorato con offerte di riso e fagioli, ōkami, il lupo ma anche, foneticamente, la grande divinità, abitava i paesaggi selvaggi di una natura spiritualizzata. Messaggeri degli dei, i lupi venivano raffigurati in coppia nell’atto di intonare il suono sacro, OM. Finché nel Settecento esplode la rabbia: in Francia la bestia di Gévaudan sparge il terrore nelle Cévennes, nel Giappone devastato dall’epidemia il lupo diventa un temuto e sanguinario assassino. Il colpo di grazia arriva con la modernizzazione in epoca Meiji, In Hokkaido, dove il clima rigido rende poco redditizia la coltivazione del riso, Edwin Dun istituisce un collegio agronomico americano. Sorgono fattorie che sembrano trapiantate di sana pianta dal Montana. Vi si allevano bovini e cavalli. Il lupo, che finché l’economia si reggeva sulla coltivazione del riso era stato un alleato, con l’allevamento diventa un nemico. Lo sterminano con la stricnina, in un vero e proprio voltafaccia. L’ultimo fu ucciso nel 1905 vicino all’antica capitale di Nara, a Higashi Yoshino, villaggio di taglialegna dove un americano incaricato dal Duca di Bedford di raccogliere esemplari di animali esotici, Malcolm Anderson, ne acquistò la carcassa che finì imbalsamata a Londra al British Museum of Natural History. Passano gli anni, l’estinzione del lupo, il desolante silenzio incontrato da chi spera, ululando verso le montagne, di avere risposta dall’ōkami perduto, diventa il punto di partenza del movimento ambientalista, di tante domande sul prezzo della modernità. Nel marzo del 1987, in riva al fiume Takama, viene eretto un monumento per ricordare l’ultimo esemplare di una specie sopravvissuta proprio nella terra che gli aveva dichiarato guerra.

Das Buch bietet eine breite Analyse über das Aussterben der Wölfe in Japan.Die Kapitel sind sinnvoll aufgebaut und der Schreibstil ist sehr ansprechend, die Leidenschaft des Autors für das Thema ist mitreißend.Es hat mir großen Spaß gemaht dieses Buch zu lesen, eine klare Empfehlung.