Brett L. Walker - The Lost Wolves of Japan

BRETT L. WALKER
Foreword by William Cronon

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS
Seattle and London

The Lost Wolves of Japan has been published with the assistance of a grant from the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books Endowment, established by the Weyerhaeuser Company Foundation, members of the Weyerhaeuser family, and Janet and Jack Creighton.

2005 by the University of Washington Press
Designed by Pamela Canell
Maps by Dale Martin

eISBN 13: 978-0-295-98993-8
ISBN 13: 978-0-295-98814-6

All rights reserved.

University of Washington Press
P.O. Box 50096, Seattle, WA 98145
www.washington.edu/uwpress

Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data
Walker, Brett L, 1967
The lost wolves of Japan / Brett L. Walker;
foreword by William Cronon.1st ed.
(Weyerhaeuser environmental books)
ISBN 0-295-98492-9 (hardback: alk. paper)
ISBN 13: 978-0-295-98492-6
1. WolvesJapan. 2. Extinct animalsJapan. book.
QL737.C22W33 2005 599.773'0952dc22 2004031040

FOR MY PARENTS, LINDA HARBERS AND NELSON WALKER

by William Cronon

Science and the Creation of the Japanese Wolf

Culture and the Creation of Japan's Sacred Wolves

The Conflicts between Wolf Hunters and Rabid Man-Killers in Early Modern Japan

Meiji Modernization, Scientific Agriculture, and Destroying the Hokkaido Wolf

Wolf Bounties and the Ecologies of Progress

Wolf Extinction Theories and the Birth of Japan's Discipline of Ecology

Wolves and Bears Killed and Bounties Paid by Administrative Region, 18771881

A Strange Violent Intimacy
William Cronon

Wolves and other big predators have long loomed large in the history, literature, and folklore of human interactions with the natural world. Although there is wide variation from culture to culture in the ways these creatures are depicted, they rarely surface in our collective memory without standing in one way or another for the fierce autonomy of nature in resisting the visions of order that people in the modern era like to imagine they can impose on the world around them. Wolves in particular occupy a peculiarly fraught place in our cultural conceptions of nature, since their intelligence, their communication skills, their sociability, their cooperative hunts, and, not least, their close kinship to the domesticated dogs that are arguably our closest animal companions make them seem uniquely familiar to us. These and other qualities enable us to gaze on these creatures and see in them powerful reflections of some of our own most cherished human qualities.

And yet wolves also contest our dominion of the landscapes from which we wrest our livelihoods, threatening our comfortable conviction that we are safely in control of nature. They kill our animals and, under rare circumstances, can even feast on human flesh to prove that we too can become prey to chains of predation that lead not just to our own stomachs, but to the stomachs of other animals as well. No doubt because of this strange violent intimacy between ourselves and wolves, the history of our relationship is bathed in blood, so much so that nation after nation over the past two hundred years has eventually succeeded in driving wolves to the brink of local extinction and beyond. It is no accident that they have come to symbolizethe wildest places on earth, for until very recently we have systematically extirpated them from almost everywhere else.

Much has been written about the environmental history of wolves in the United States, in part because of the striking reversal in American attitudes toward predators during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Aldo Leopold's classic essay Thinking Like a Mountain usually serves as the symbolic benchmark for this change, describing as it does a landscape that underwent massive environmental degradation as deer herds exploded with the removal of large predators like wolves. The essay was a famous mea culpa for Leopold himself, since he had devoted considerable energy early in his career to promoting predator control in the American Southwest, realizing too late that his own efforts were helping destroy the very wilderness he hoped to preserve. Although Leopold's conclusions about the role of wolves in controlling deer populations have been challenged in subsequent yearshe likely exaggerated the scale of the famous Kaibab deer disaster of the 1920s, and probably overemphasized the role of wolves in controlling deer herds while underemphasizing the importance of Native American hunters in performing that same functionthe effects of his arguments on modern environmentalist attitudes toward predators have nonetheless been profound. Wolves, cougars, and grizzlies are now typically regarded as among the most important keystone species in North American ecosystems, so that their presence or absence has become one of the most widely embraced biological measures of wilderness in the United States and Canada.