At the same time, the native prey of wolves was decimated by over-hunting, and the wolves had quickly turned to eating the new hoofed ungulates on their landscape: horses and cows.
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Part of this entailed introducing ranching (all the other modernized countries ranched), so they brought in ranchers and wolfers from the West to teach them how to raise horses and cows and kill wolves. (I’ll be the first to admit I got confused by the different islands he discussed, and the differences in their topography, climate and prey - so I’m over-generalizing here.)īut when the Meiji Restoration took place and Japan was unified from the comparatively-looser knit feudal system of the Tokugawa-family shoguns, the new government was myopically focused on modernizing the country. Walkers writes that the ungulate prey species likely traveled to the Pacific-side of the islands in winter because these held less snow and forage was found more easily, and the wolves followed the prey seasonally.
These animals historically followed prey like red deer and several now-extinct variety of large deer, as well as (possibly) boar, fish and the occassional beached whale. He concludes that true wolves of the Canis lupus variety migrated to the Japanese archipelago from mainland Siberia and underwent evolutionary insular dwarfism, resulting in a smaller-statured wolf than found on the mainland. Walker first investigates the taxonomy of Japanese wolves, which was disputed and left unclear (similar to the red wolf) because there were so few whole specimens to study prior to their extinction around 1905 (though some say this date is wrong and they survived until the mid-1940s, post World War II). He examines the near-myth of Japanese “oneness” with nature the culture of the Ainu (an indigenous people group in the Japanese archipelago) and their spiritual reverence for wild wolves, and their close relationship with domesticated hunting dogs how early Japanese naturalists classified the wolves and mountain dogs that populated their islands the Japanese government’s quest to modernize their society through ranching during the early years of the Meiji Restoration (ca. He pokes and prods the relationships of these entitites to each other by using various historical lenses. Walker explores many different themes in The Lost Wolves of Japan, most of which are centered around people, culture, wolves and nature. If you like historical detail, this book serves it up in helping after generous helping. He used historical research methodologies to frame an inquiry into what the Japanese wolf was, and what led to its extinction. Author Brett Walker is a professor of history at Montana State University who specializes in Japanese history this book was published by the Univ. The Lost Wolves of Japan is a first-rate academically-oriented text that combs through the natural and cultural history of wolves on the Japanese archipelago. Using new and little-known material from archives as well as Ainu oral traditions and archaeology, Walker poses an exciting new set of questions and issues that have yet to be approached in so innovative and thorough a fashion.The Lost Wolves of Japan, by Brett Walker Rather than presenting a mere juxtaposition of oppression and resistance, he offers a subtle analysis of how material and ecological changes induced by trade with Japan set in motion a reorientation of the whole northern culture and landscape. Walker takes a fresh and original approach. By framing his study between the cultural and ecological worlds of the Ainu before and after two centuries of sustained contact with the Japanese, the author demonstrates with great clarity just how far the Ainu were incorporated into the Japanese political economy and just how much their ceremonial and material life-not to mention disease ecology, medical culture, and their physical environment-had been infiltrated by Japanese cultural artifacts, practices, and epidemiology by the early nineteenth century.
Inspired by "new Western" historians of the United States, Walker positions Ezo not as Japan's northern "frontier" but as a borderland or middle ground. This model monograph is the first scholarly study to put the Ainu-the native people living in Ezo, the northernmost island of the Japanese archipelago-at the center of an exploration of Japanese expansion during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the height of the Tokugawa shogunal era.
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