Raccoons are rapidly spreading in Tokyo, stymying local officials

Tokyo is seeing skyrocketing numbers of raccoons in the city as the invasive critters continue to spread across Japan.

Tokyo has found itself o-fur-run with invasive, North American raccoons and local officials have found efforts to curtail their growing numbers to be largely ineffective.

Thousands of the omnivorous critters were brought to Japan from Canada and the U.S. after a 1970s anime called Rascal the Raccoon popularized the idea of caring for raccoons as pets. At the peak of Japan’s raccoon craze, up to 1,500 raccoons were being brought into the country.

Japan eventually banned raccoon imports, but the damage was done.

Just as the protagonist of Rascal the Raccoon learns, these wild animals are not meant to be pets and are better off in nature. Many of Japan’s raccoon owners came to the same conclusion and let their four-legged friends free. Some raccoons took the decision into their own tiny hands and escaped. Without any natural predators, these furry interlopers have spread across the country, leaving a path of destruction in their wake.

Tokyo specifically has seen a fivefold increase in the number of raccoons caught each year in the past decade. In 2012, officials trapped 259 raccoons. By 2022, that number had jumped to 1,282.

And this only captures a small portion of Tokyo’s raccoon problem; a municipal official told the Mainichi Shimbun that only a fraction of raccoons are successfully caught because they’re so adept at breaking out of cages.

“Our traps are sometimes broken as raccoons are also desperate to live,” the official said. “Only a fraction is actually caught, so we are unable to grasp their overall range.”

Raccoons are a stubborn issue for Japan’s farmers, in particular. They’ve been blamed for millions of dollars worth of damage to crops over the years.