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”

- 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.