A member of the dog family living in and around Japanese forests.
It has yellowish-brown fur with dark markings around and below the eyes.
Some recent research treats the Japanese raccoon dog as a distinct species, Nyctereutes viverrinus. In 2026, a team including Japan’s National Institute for Environmental Studies used ear tissue from one raccoon dog killed in a traffic accident in Fukushima to grow cells and build a reference genome. The assembly is about 2.69 billion bases and scored 98.2% in BUSCO, a measure of gene completeness.
Comparing 5,822 shared genes across 19 canid species placed the Japanese raccoon dog closest to its continental relative, but on a distinct branch. This one-animal reference provides a starting point for studying differences among regional populations and the lineage’s history of divergence. The cultured cells are also a resource for future research.
IUCN Red List (species-status field in Mammal Diversity Database) · Not Evaluated · Global (current species Nyctereutes viverrinus)
Under the current taxonomy used by the Mammal Diversity Database, the IUCN Red List entry for the Japanese raccoon dog (Nyctereutes viverrinus) is “Not Evaluated”; no assessment year or date is given. A 2016 IUCN global assessment listed the broader taxon Nyctereutes procyonoides as Least Concern (LC) and then included Japanese raccoon dogs as a subspecies. That older assessment cannot be assigned to the currently recognized species N. viverrinus. Mapping its distribution across Japan and documenting regional population and genetic differences would help provide evidence for a species-level conservation assessment.