![]() ![]() Some legends portray the Japanese wolf as being prophetic creatures. Another belief from the Kanto area of eastern Japan was that feeding an infant wolf's milk would make them grow up strong. ![]() ![]() Another belief was of wolves that raised an infant who had been abandoned in the forests of the Kii Peninsula, and later became the clan leader Fujiwara no Hidehira. An offering was sometimes made for this escort. In Japanese folklore, there is the widely recorded belief of the okuriōkami ("escort wolf") that followed someone walking alone through a forest at night until they reach their home without doing them any harm. The most famous national shrine is located at Mitsumine in Chichibu, Saitama Prefecture and there are a number of smaller wolf shrines on the Kii Peninsula, including the Tamaki Shrine and the Katakati Shrine at Totsukawa village. ![]() There are an estimated 20 Shinto wolf shrines on Honshu alone. Many mountain villages, such as Okamiiwa ("Wolf Rock") and Okamitaira ("Wolf Plateau"), are named after the wolf this could be due to a sighting at the location, or a simple homage to the species. The mountains of Japan, seen as a dangerous, deadly place, were highly associated with the wolf, which was believed to be their protector and guardian. Wild animals were associated with the mountain spirit Yama-no-kami. In the Shinto belief, the ōkami ("wolf") is regarded as a messenger of the kami spirits and also offers protection against crop raiders such as the wild boar and deer. There had been numerous other aliases referring to Japanese wolf, and the name ōkami (wolf) is derived from the Old Japanese öpö-kamï, meaning either "great-spirit" where wild animals were associated with the mountain spirit Yama-no-kami in the Shinto religion, or "big dog", or "big bite" (ōkami or ōkame), and "big mouth" Ōkuchi-no-Makami (Japanese) was an old and deified alias for Japanese wolf where it was both worshipped and feared, and it meant "a true god with big-mouth" based on several theories either referring to wolf's mouth with associations with several legends and folklore such as the wolf guided Yamato Takeru and was titled so by the prince, or a region in Asuka called Ōkuchi-no-Makami-no-Hara where Asuka no Kinunui no Konoha (Japanese) lived and a number of people were said to be killed by an old wolf there. hodopylax' s binomial name derives from the Greek Hodos (path) and phylax (guardian), in reference to Okuri-inu from Japanese folklore, which portrayed wolves or weasels as the protectors of travelers. However, due to environmental and behavioral factors, doubts persist over their identity.Ĭ. Well-documented observations of similar canids have been made throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, and have been suggested to be surviving wolves. Many dog breeds originating from Japan also have Japanese wolf DNA from past hybridization.ĭespite long being revered in Japan, the introduction of rabies and canine distemper to Japan led to the decimation of the population, and policies enacted during the Meiji Restoration led to the persecution and eventual total extermination of the subspecies by the early 20th century. Phylogenetic evidence indicates that Japanese wolf was the last surviving wild member of the Pleistocene wolf lineage (in contrast to the Hokkaido wolf which belonged to the lineage of the modern day gray wolf), and may have been the closest wild relative of the domestic dog. It was one of two subspecies that were once found in the Japanese archipelago, the other being the Hokkaido wolf. The Japanese wolf (Japanese: ニホンオオカミ(日本狼), Hepburn: Nihon ōkami, or 山犬, yamainu Canis lupus hodophilax ), also known as the Honshū wolf, is an extinct subspecies of the gray wolf that was once endemic to the islands of Honshū, Shikoku and Kyūshū in the Japanese archipelago. ![]()
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