Atami's AD, sometimes a director, 24 September 2025
At about 16:05 on 18 January 2026, someone in Miyakami (宮上) called the police: a wild boar, the alert says, was walking the lanes our macaques treat as their own. It raised a question this town keeps circling back to: when a boar turns up, who still goes out to deal with it?
The monkeys already have a routine. Living with the T1 troop covers those lanes, and residents chase the monkeys off with firecrackers from the town. A boar is a different animal. The town's wild animal page describes them rooting up fields and gardens, with hunters and farmers doing the capturing. Ryokan stand along the same lanes, listed with the places to stay.
A month later the coast had another call. On 5 February 2026, a Hakone alert reported a boar about 1.2 metres long in Hakone Yumoto.
Who still goes out
Town News, on 3 November 2017, counted 19 members in the Yugawara hunters' association (猟友会), some of them in their eighties. In the 1960s there were more than 100 hunters.
That article also follows the meat, to a workshop on the town line. Yama no Megumi is in Izumi, Atami, at 413-340, on the Yugawara side. It opened in October 2017. Kadoya, a limited liability company, has run it since May 2022. Town News said the place had the health centre's permission, and Pocket Marche calls it a processing facility with health-centre approval. The meat is mainly boar, plus deer, taken as pests around Atami and Yugawara. The workshop's site is a short page of information, and a local profile lists it too. Visits are by appointment. It is not on the ministry's national wild-game certification list (国産ジビエ認証), and no Kanagawa facility is on that list either. The film above is a tour of the place, published on 24 September 2025.
Back in Miyakami, the meat is already on a plate. Yoru no Ajito (よるのあじと), at 232-4 Miyakami, 0465-57-1045, cooks Italian food with deer and boar: deer ragù, boar pâté, and badger. ELLE, on 4 April 2025, writes that owner-chef Ryoko Kawai runs a wild-meat business with hunters. The tourism association lists the restaurant on its gourmet page. None of that is the ministry's certification.
One town along, Odawara put wild meat on the city's own channel. colorful Vol.24, from Odawara City's official channel, came out on 1 June 2023. An Odawara programme, not a producer from here. Japanese wild meat with the national certification, sold by the producer, is on wildfood.jp. Izu Oshima Gibier is one of those producers. It is not local.
This call belongs with the seven boar catchers of Kawabori and with swine fever in Yugawara's wild boar. Swine fever does not infect humans. The whole set is on Yugawara wildlife.