Tanuki Dog

Blakiston's Fish Owl is a massive (60-72cm) owl. The upper parts are buff-brown and heavily streaked. The under parts are pale buffish-brown. The throat is white. The iris is orange-yellow, and it has long, broad, horizontal ear-tufts. Sexes are similar, with females notably larger. The call varies by subspecies; in some places the call is a short, deep boo-bo-voo or a shoo-boo.
This bird is endangered due to the widespread loss of riverine forest, increasing development along rivers and dam construction. The current population in Japan is approximately 100 birds (20 breeding pairs and unpaired individuals), whereas on mainland Asia the population is much higher, perhaps several thousand individuals.
Henry Seebohm named this bird after the English naturalist Thomas Blakiston, who collected the original specimen in Hakodate on Hokkaidō, Japan in 1883.

Never mess with a big brown bear, especially big brown bears in Hokkaido known in Japanese as higuma. Unlike the bears in Honshu and the rest of Japan, the brown bears in Hokkaido are a different species, as are all of the native mammals on the northern side of the Tsugaru strait (the Blakiston line).

Although they are classified as a different species from American pikas, their appearance and ecology are very similar to theirs. The biggest difference is their in a critical situation because of timber cutting and the construction of roads and ski resorts while American pikas live peacefully. Their sensitive to automobile exhaust and have a low tolerance to heat; therefore, they emphasize that any more development in otheir habitat must be stopped even though such development may give human beings enormous conveniences.

How it has been announced that Edinburgh Zoo has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Chinese government about bringing pandas to Scotland.
The move is of huge economic significance for the zoo, as there are only eight pandas in western zoos currently, and four of those are in the US. If it was one of the few places in the west you can see a real live panda the zoo estimates it could bring in well over a million visitors a year.
China claims that it no longer practices panda diplomacy, and only lends out pandas to take part in scientific and captive breeding programmes.

However, Chinese President Hu Jintao on a recent visit to Japan offered two pandas to replace Ling Ling, Tokyo zoo’s panda who had died just before the visit. The move was widely interpreted as having more to do with Sino-Japanese relations on a host of important issues such as North Korea and disputed rights to underwater gas reserves.

The Japanese dragon, also known as ryū or tatsu, is closely related to the Chinese lóng and the Korean ryong. They are described as having a scowling head, long straight horns, a scaly, wingless serpentine body, a bristling row of dorsal spines, four limbs armed with claws, and curious flamelike appendages on its shoulders and hips, and are associated with large bodies of water, clouds or the heavens. Japanese dragons tend to be much more slender and fly less frequently than the dragons of Vietnam, Korea, or China, which may cause the Japanese dragon to appear particularly serpentine.

The word ‘dragon' stands for a genus of which there are several species and varieties. To describe them in full, and to recount minutely the ideas held by the Japanese rustics concerning them would be to compile an octavo work on dragonology. In the carvings on tombs, temples, dwellings and shops--on the government documents--printed on the old and the new paper money, and stamped on the new coins--in pictures and books, on musical instruments, in high relief on bronzes, and cut in stone, metal and wood,--the dragon (tasu) everywhere "swings the scaly horror of his folded tail," whisks his long mustaches, or glares with his terrible eyes. The dragon is the only animal in modern Japan that wears hairy ornaments on the upper lip.

The ryū in art can generally be distinguished from other East-Asian dragons in that it has only three toes, rather than the lóng's five or the ryong's four. the Ryū originated from China and is one of the four divine beasts of Japanese mythology (the other three being the crimson bird, black turtle and white tiger).

Much like Western Dragons, Japanese dragons originally killed innocent people and forced towns to give them beautiful maidens for food. Dragons in later Japanese folklore were often much more benign, perhaps because of influence from Chinese culture. They appear in famous tales such as My Lord Bag of Rice, in which a hero must kill a giant centipede which is devouring the children of the dragon king of Lake Biwa. In Urashima Tarō, the title character rescues a turtle which turns out to be the daughter of Ryūjin, the dragon king of the ocean.

The Ryu are also distinguished by their color, such as the violet, the yellow, the green, the red, the white, the black and the flying-dragon. When the white dragon breathes the breath of its lungs goes into the earth and turns to gold. When the violet dragon spits, the spittle becomes balls of pure crystal, of which gems and caskets are made.