Ōnuma Rhinoceros

The Ōnuma Rhinoceros is a Japanese cryptid said to inhabit marshy areas around Ōnuma Quasi-National Park on Hokkaido. Descriptions range from a stocky, horned creature with thick gray skin to something more resembling a prehistoric woolly rhinoceros. Sightings generally occur at dawn or dusk, with reports of heavy splashing in reed beds followed by glimpses of a low, lumbering silhouette. Scientists dismiss the legend as local embellishment, pointing out that no large land mammals native to Japan match such features. Nevertheless, the Ōnuma Rhinoceros persists in regional folklore as a ghost from a bygone age, merging faint echoes of paleontology with modern uncertainties about what might still move quietly through Japan’s remote northern wetlands.