Tokyo Weekender July 2016

THE MISUNDERSTOOD
CROWS OF TOKYO
Love or hate them, the city’s gigantic crows cannot be ignored. To make sense
of their place in the concrete jungle, we look at their longheld connection with
Japan, and some surprising lessons we can learn from these sometimes smart,
sometimes foolish “urban guerrillas of birds”
Words by Alec Jordan
In Japan, the public perception of crows got off to a pretty
good start: According to the Kojiki and the Nihonshoki, two
of Japan’s oldest written records, a gigantic crow known as
the Yatagarasu guided the mythical first emperor of Japan
to the part of the country now known as Nara. This crow,
which is often depicted with three legs, can be found at the Kumano
shrines of Japan, and even more commonly, on the uniforms
of the Samurai Blue – Japan’s national soccer team.
But even though they have been common figures in art from
well before the Edo period, crows are generally seen with a mixed
perspective in Japan. On one hand, you have the traditional song
“Yuyake Koyake,” which plays on loudspeakers every afternoon
and whose lyrics tell us return home like the crows return to
their roosts in the trees, but there are also still the associations
of the birds with death – even today, there is a superstition that
if a crow perches on a house at night and calls out, someone in
that house will die before long. We may be happy to return home
like crows – as straight as they fly – but we don’t necessarily want
them roosting with us.
Today, perhaps, the biggest problem that people face with
crows around Tokyo is trying to keep them out of their garbage.
And the birds can cause other kinds of trouble as well: the Tokyo
Metropolitan Government receives some 600 calls a year from
Tokyoites who’ve been attacked by crows – most often in spring,
around the time when the birds are hatching their eggs and raising
their newborn young.
Nonetheless, crows have their fans in Tokyo, just as they do
everywhere around the world. Why? It could be their intelligence
– crows know how to use tools, they recognize human faces, and
they’ve even been observed to hold what look to be funerals. It
might be their distinctive voices: crows and their larger cousin
the ravens are believed to possess some of the most complicated
vocabulary of calls of any bird. Or maybe it’s a shared sense
of play. The birds have been seen using wind currents like children
might use waterslides, throwing paper to themselves, going