An entire article on Japan, racoons, anime, and even a note on the native tanuki, yet not one mention of the excellent Ghibli anime, Pom Poko.
For some reason, this charming Miyazaki (edit - Takahata, not Miyazaki! thanks for the catch) work has not been widely marketed in the West, which is a shame as it is as enjoyable and fun as the more famous ones like Spirited Away or Porco Rosso.
Pom Poko is a Ghibli movie, yes, but it was directed by Isao Takahata, not Miyazaki.
I can aunderstand why it's not been marketed as much; it's pretty long-winded and it deals with Japanese stories and folklore that are foreign to the general western audience.
> it deals with Japanese stories and folklore that are foreign to the general western audience.
That is also true of Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, My Neighbour Totoro... a lot of other Ghibli productions that did get lots of exposure.
I think the issue with that particular movie is that (IIRC) is a bit heavy on the ecological agenda, overall is not great (funny here and there though) and I don't think it was ever dubbed. The subtitles I've seen floating around are pretty terrible.
Someone should put together a Takahata retrospective with good subtitles.
I enjoy Ghiblis movies, and enjoyed Pom Poko, but I wouldn't put it in the same class as Spirited Away, maybe Porco Rosso (but I prefer Porco Rosso myself).
I used to see a fox around my old house in Nagoya, but never when anyone else was around.
Then I started seeing a young girl walking a fox-like dog in the area, and she always seemed to be caught in the act when I came upon her, and again no one else was ever around.
I said hello to her once and she just walked right past as if she didn't see me, which is pretty odd behavior in Japan. I will go to my grave believing that she was a shapeshifter, even though I'm not usually in for such superstitious nonsense.
There's a Radiolab podcast about Guadeloupean raccoons, where they're considered almost sacred even though they're as pesky as in the US. I found the locals discussing their attitude to the incredulity of the Radiolab hosts quite amusing.
Oh, there's lots of places in the world that consider raccoons sacred. Just look at how my city reacted to the death of one:
https://imgur.com/gallery/h9LRo
Very funny. I love when people come together in ways like this.
I think our equivalent in Australia would be the possum, often finding its way into your roof cavity, dying and stinking the place out. They make some ghastly growling noises at night (as do koalas).
"Raccoons have since proliferated in Japan, where they have no natural predators"
well to be honest, there really isn't predators for them here in Pennsylvania either. Owls 'may' grab a really young one, but honestly cars probably kill way more
Coyotes eat racoons all the time out here in rural Michigan. They seem to prefer rabbits, or at least rabbits are louder: whenever I am out in the woods at night camping or just sitting around a campfire, I hear the death screams of a rabbit or three, indicating there are coyotes active.
There aren't so many bobcats around anymore to help out, but they'll eat them too. Down here in the lower peninsula, we don't have wolves anymore (and you can tell from the huge number of cars in body shop parking lots from deer collisions), but I assume they'd take a raccoon if they wanted to.
The problem, though, is that while the raccoons do fine around humans and even in cities, large predators like coyotes and bobcats don't. And if one does do well, they're exterminated (or, I suppose, sedated and moved out of the city humanely) like the wolves were.
I'm sure you have plenty of all these predators in the wilderness outside Toronto up around Algonquin, but in cities and developed areas there are few natural predators.
We're just to the left of center on that map and see coyotes regularly. But we're suburban. Of more interest to me are the coyotes that live in downtown Chicago.
Cars may be enough to stabilize raccoon population. They are territorial. Young ones either replace an older one, or get pushed out of established territories and end up wandering the road (no-raccoons-land). So cars are serving as 'failed raccoon euthenasia'.
You're not kidding. When I bought my house it had sat empty for a couple of years and a family of raccoons had added it to their territory. Closing up vents helped, but once a year or so they'd return and try again. I'm just guessing but I think the mothers would still try to work the metal grating out of the vents when they were pregnant.
I didn't really want to kill them and frankly trapping them seemed like a lot of work, plus they had fleas and potentially carry rabies, not to mention possibly having a parasite in their feces. I didn't want to hurt them and I didn't really want to get near them. As with most anything else you can buy the solution on the internet: puma pee. A liberal sprinkling of the foul smelling stuff ran off me, my wife and the raccoons. We can't smell it any more but apparently the raccoons can because they haven't returned.
If the raccoon density is high enough that they are pushing out into new territory, the cars have failed to keep the population in check. They can easily reach 20 per square kilometer in areas with enough trash and other food sources, which is a very bad situation for an invasive species.
The article specifically talks about NA raccoons imported from the US by the thousands as pets following Araiguma Rasukaru[0], not about the native Tanuki.
Similar problem in reverse is the explosive growth of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallopia_japonica all over Europe's forests and gardens. The plant is nearly unkillable and thus extremely expensive to get rid of. Here in Switzerland, dirt contaminated with its roots is counted as a hazardous waste that you need to take extra precaution for transit and disposal.
Thankfully by now we've learned to be more careful with importing non-indigenous species.
Now is probably a good time to start eradicating them, since they're still relatively small in population. The risks are pretty high for an animal like this.
I hear they're also pretty good eating. Enough meat to make them worth butchering, and they apparently taste something like the dark meat off a chicken (quite greasy, but also excellent for frying).
Maybe a recipe book is the kind of public outreach required.
That's a lot like deer in the US after Bambi. They used to be a nuisance. Now we think they are cute. If you live in a place with enough of them you may start to realize they are a nuisance.
TLDR: Japan's now full of raccoons because an anime (Araiguma Rasukaru) made them look like fun to keep as pets, until you have to let them go into the wild because they're getting too aggressive.
But Japan's not really full of raccoons. I've never seen a raccoon in ~4 years here and I've seen 30+ wild tanukis (up to 10 or so could have been the same ones). It also states in the article that Hokkaido has been killing off 2,000 raccoons per year because of the agricultural loss due to raccoons. With that being said I've only seen 2 wild raccoons in America in 25 years so maybe they're just much better at hiding than tanukis.
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