From NIPPO's 50th Anniversary History, Volume 1, 1936 (Showa 11)
Domestic dogs have been bred in Japan since the Stone Age.
These included small, medium, and large sizes.
There are two smaller breeds, named First Japanese Dog （第一日本犬）and Second Japanese Dog （第二日本犬）.
The other two breeds are intermediate between the two or crossbreds, making a total of four breeds, but the two main breeds are the above two.
Of course, the nature of the fur and other characteristics can only be guessed at, but the following differences between the first and second are easy to distinguish in the skeletal structure.
In the Stone Age, the first Japanese dog was more common, but according to Hiroshi Saito's theory, there are absolutely no modern Japanese dogs that do not have stops like the first Japanese dog, and most of them are closer to the second Japanese dog.
By the time Mr. Hasebe first reported on Japan's Stone Age domestic dogs in 1924, only the skeletons of small breeds were in hand.
However, two domestic dog skeletons collected the following year during the excavation of the Ohdora shell mound in Kesen County and two skulls donated by Soshichiro Mori and Genshichi Endo in 1927 from the Numazu shell mound outside Ishinomaki City both surpassed the Second Japanese Dog in size.
Furthermore, it is a medium-sized breed that is comparable to the Ash Dogs found in the ash layers of Bronze Age sites in Europe, such as Austrian and Czechoslovakia.
This indicates that the first and second Japanese dogs and medium-sized dogs were bred during the same Stone Age period.
Therefore, I would like to call this medium-sized dog the Fifth Japanese Dog（第五日本犬）, but I have other ideas and refrain from doing so.
In the text of Mr. Hiroshi Saito's introduction of the Stone Age domestic dog in “Nihon Ken” Vol. 5, No. 1, he does not mention this medium-sized domestic dog, which, similar to the Daiichi Nippon Inu, has a nearly flat forehead, i.e., without or with a weak stop.
If there was already a medium-sized dog, it is natural to assume that there could have been a large dog.
I thought that a single lower jawbone, which happened to be collected from a shell mound in Kesen County's Monzen Shell Mound, would be the equivalent of a large domestic dog.
However, Mr. Hiroshi Saito, who is a Japanese native, said that no domestic dog had teeth as large as those of this specimen, and treated it as a wild animal.
Dr. Yosio Abe and others also considered the so-called “Yamainu” to be a wild animal, but they also suspected that it was a domestic dog that had become feral.
For this reason, I would like to see the skeletal skulls of other so-called “Yamainu” in Leiden, Berlin, London, etc.
Until then I cannot recognize the so-called Yamainu as a pure beast.
The lower jawbone from the Monzen Shell Mound is comparable to that of a Bronze Dog found at a European Bronze Age site in terms of both thickness and length of dentition.
However, the length of the first molar is 25mm, which is slightly larger than the 24mm of a Bronze Age dog.
However, the gap between the canine teeth and the first premolars is 6 mm, and the gap between the second and third premolars is 5 mm.
This would make the dentition sparse and less beastly than that of the so-called wolf, which I will discuss later.
And just because the teeth are a little bigger does not make it a beast.
Some domestic dogs are larger than bronze dogs. It is the lower jaw teeth.
I should say that it is too early to rule out the Monzen dog as not being a domestic dog, but since the material is only one lower jawbone, I would not make the claim that it is not a wild animal until it is.
In this connection, I would like to say a few words about the so-called Yamainu.
According to Dr. Yosio Abe, there are two Yamainu skulls in the British Museum in London.
One of them was apparently collected in 1904 at Yamato Washikaguchi.
Japanese zoologists were not sleeping, yet even during the Russo-Japanese War period, foreign travelers obtained the Yamainu.
And yet, nowhere in Japan today are any Yamainu skeletons preserved, except stuffed.
This is the first point that does not add up. But even many European scholars are quick to make hasty judgments.
I would first suspect that the term “yamainu” was used to describe a domestic dog that had become wild.
However, it is true that the teeth of not only the British Museum specimen, but also the Yamainu in the Berlin Anatomy Department are so large that they do not resemble those of a domestic dog.
However, the one from the Leiden Museum is the most suspicious, with a lower first molar length of 24 mm, so this is a bronze dog class.
No Yamainu skeletons have been preserved in Japan, but two lower jaw bones found in shell mounds have even larger teeth than those of the London and Berlin Yamainu.
One of the lower first molars from the En'oe clam mound measures 28 mm in alveolar length.
The other is from the Oodora shell mound, and is also 27 mm in length measured from the alveolus.
The Yamato yamainu from London has a lower first molar length of 26 mm, while the one from Berlin is 25.5 mm, so there is not much difference.
Also, although larger than bronze dogs and other breeds, the Leiden one is 24 mm, as mentioned above, and the difference reaches 4 cm compared to the clam-shelled one.
The large difference between the two cannot be considered as the same species.
Therefore, the clam mounds and the lower jawbone of the large cave were not assigned to the Yamainu, assuming that they belonged to the wolf.
Hodophilax” means a guide. This is confusing because it refers to wolves.
Without seeing the actual animals, it is impossible to distinguish on one's own that the ones in Berlin and London are wild beasts and the ones in Leiden are domestic dogs gone wild.
Lumped together, they were to be treated separately from the beast that bequeathed the lower jawbone to the clam mound and Oohora.
In the lower jawbone of the clam mound and Oohora the teeth are large and the dentition is dense.
The gap between the canine and first premolar is 4 mm or 3.5 mm; the gap between the second and third and premolar is 2 mm or 3 mm.
The gap is significantly smaller than the Monzen beasts mentioned previously.
In this respect, it is difficult to equate the beast of Monzen with the beasts of Clam Mound and Oohora.
Therefore, the beast of Monzen was a large domestic dog of bronze class, while the beasts of the clam mound and Oohora were wolves. In order to avoid any misunderstanding that the descriptions by Mr. Abe and Mr. Saito make them the same as Yamainu, I have noted the above points again here.
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