Japan's national animal is usually given as its national bird, the green pheasant (Phasianus versicolor), called kiji (雉) in Japanese. It is a traditional rather than legal symbol: the Ornithological Society of Japan, a scientific body and not a government agency, chose it on 22 March 1947, and no law has confirmed it since. The bird is found in the wild only in Japan, on Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu, and it appeared on the back of the 10,000-yen note introduced in 1984 and replaced in 2004, in the folk tale of Momotarō, in the name of a seventh-century imperial era, as the prefectural bird of Iwate and Okayama, and on the crest of the J1 League football club Fagiano Okayama.
The Ornithological Society's Vote of 22 March 1947
Japan's flag and anthem have legal backing: the Hinomaru and "Kimigayo" were made official by the Act on National Flag and Anthem in 1999. The pheasant has nothing comparable. Its title rests on a decision by the Ornithological Society of Japan in the spring of 1947, two years after the end of the Second World War.
Japanese Wikipedia lists the reasons the society gave. The hen walks with her chicks in a line, which was read as a picture of family harmony. The cock rises from the grass with a powerful, masculine flight. The species is endemic to Japan and so could stand for the country alone. It is resident all year, lives close to villages and is easy to see. Its plumage is beautiful enough to interest people with no special love of birds. It is large and good to eat, which made it a suitable quarry for sport hunting. And it already appeared under the name kiji in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, the eighth-century chronicles, and in the Momotarō story every child knew.
That list is unusually honest about hunting: the society chose a bird partly because it was good sport and good eating, and the green pheasant remains a legal game bird today.
The Series D 10,000-Yen Note, 1984–2004
The pheasant's most widely seen appearance was on money. The Bank of Japan's Series D 10,000-yen note, issued from 1 November 1984, carried a portrait of Fukuzawa Yukichi, the Meiji-era writer and founder of Keio University, on the front. On the back was a pair of green pheasants: according to Japanese Wikipedia, a standing cock on the left and a hen sitting on the right. Even the round blank space in the centre of the note, around the watermark, was designed to suggest a pheasant's egg.
The note was the largest denomination in circulation for twenty years, so for a generation of Japanese the pheasant was the image on the money in their wallets. The Series E note of 1 November 2004 kept Fukuzawa on the front but replaced the birds on the reverse with the hōō, the Chinese-style phoenix statue from the roof of the Phoenix Hall at Byōdō-in in Uji, near Kyoto. The phoenix was a return rather than a novelty: the first 10,000-yen note, of 1958, had shown a pair of phoenixes taken from a pattern inside the same hall. The current Series F note, issued on 3 July 2024, shows the industrialist Shibusawa Eiichi and Tokyo Station. The pheasant has not returned.
Hakuchi, the White-Pheasant Era of 650–654
Long before banknotes, a pheasant gave its name to a stretch of Japanese history. In 650, the governor of Nagato Province, at the western tip of Honshu, presented a white pheasant to Emperor Kōtoku. A pale bird was read as a good omen, and the emperor was so pleased that he summoned his ministers to view it and renamed the era Hakuchi (白雉), meaning "white pheasant". It ran from February 650 to December 654 and was only the second era name in the Japanese system of nengō, borrowed from the Chinese practice. Some scholars doubt that the first two era names were really used at the time, but the chronicles record Hakuchi all the same.
The bird's old name also survives. Tenth-century texts such as the dictionary Wamyō Ruijushō record it as kigisu, and the Man'yōshū, the anthology compiled after 759, contains six poems mentioning it. In 1688 the haiku poet Matsuo Bashō wrote a verse in which the call of a pheasant makes him long for his father and mother, a link between the bird and parental love that also runs through the proverb yakeno no kigisu, "the pheasant of the burnt field", used of a parent's devotion to a child.
Momotarō's Pheasant and the Kojiki's Messenger Nakime
The Kojiki, compiled in 712, already gives the pheasant a job. When the god Ame-no-Wakahiko is sent down to earth and fails to report back for eight years, the gods of heaven send a pheasant called Nakime to ask why. On the advice of a woman who calls the bird an ill omen, he shoots it with the bow the gods gave him, and the arrow flies back up to heaven. The bird as messenger, and as a victim of its own voice, recurs in later Japanese sayings: kiji mo nakazuba utaremai, "the pheasant would not have been shot if it had not cried out", is still used for someone whose careless words bring trouble.
The story that fixed the pheasant in popular memory is Momotarō, the Peach Boy. An old childless couple find a boy inside a giant peach; when he grows up he sets out to fight the oni on the island of Onigashima, and on the way he wins over a dog, a monkey and a pheasant with millet dumplings, kibi dango. The pheasant serves as the scout of the team. The tale was told orally perhaps from the Muromachi period (1392–1573), written down from the Edo period, and standardised in Meiji school textbooks, which is why every Japanese child knows it.
The scouting role explains one of the bird's more surprising modern uses. Japan's Defense Intelligence Headquarters, created on 20 January 1997 by merging the military intelligence units of the Self-Defense Forces, uses a pheasant in its emblem. Japanese Wikipedia explains the choice by the bird's part in Momotarō, where it gathers information for the hero.
Iwate, Okayama and the Fagiano Okayama Crest
Below the national level, the pheasant is the official prefectural bird of two of Japan's 47 prefectures: Iwate in the north-east of Honshu and Okayama in the west. It is also the town or city bird of dozens of municipalities, from Oshu in Iwate to Iga in Mie.
Okayama's attachment is the strongest, because the prefecture claims Momotarō as a local hero. Scholars treat that claim as a modern invention, but the city has embraced it, with a statue of the boy and his companions at the east exit of Okayama Station. The local professional football club took the idea further: when it reorganised in 2004 it adopted the name Fagiano Okayama, fagiano being Italian for pheasant, and its mascot Fagimaru is a pheasant. The club now plays in the J1 League, Japan's top division, so the national bird turns up on scoreboards across the country every weekend of the season.
Folk belief adds another, less official role. Across Japan people have long said that pheasants cry out before an earthquake; the thirteenth-century encyclopaedia Chiribukuro already records that they call at times of earthquakes and thunder. Japanese Wikipedia goes further and says the birds can sense the first, faint tremors a few seconds before people can, a claim best treated with caution.
Phasianus versicolor Today: Releases, Hybrids and an IUCN Least Concern Rating
The real bird is a large, long-tailed pheasant. The cock is dark bottle green on the breast, neck and flanks, with a blue-purple hood, ear tufts, red facial wattles and a long tail barred in grey; Japanese sources give his length as about 81 centimetres, much of it tail, and his weight as 0.8 to 1.1 kilograms. The hen is smaller, about 58 centimetres, and mottled brown and black, with dark feathers fringed in pale brown. In spring the cock crows a harsh "ken-ken" and drums his wings against his body, a display the Japanese call horo-uchi. Pheasants fly reluctantly but run fast; one was clocked at 32 kilometres an hour with a speed gun.
The species lives in open woodland, forest edges, scrub, grassland and farmland on Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu and some smaller islands, often close to villages. Hens breed from March or April to June, laying clutches of six to fifteen eggs that hatch after 23 to 25 days, and the hen raises the chicks alone. The bird eats seeds, shoots and leaves as well as insects and worms. It did not originally live on Hokkaido, Tsushima or the Ryukyu Islands; there, hunters released the closely related common pheasant from the Asian mainland instead. Green pheasants were also introduced to Hawaii, where the population is stable.
Even the national bird's species status is disputed. The IOC World Bird List and BirdLife International treat the green pheasant as a separate species, while the Ornithological Society of Japan's own checklist, in its seventh edition, treats it as a subspecies of the common pheasant, Phasianus colchicus. The body that named the national bird, then, does not count it as a full species.
On the IUCN Red List, BirdLife International assessed the green pheasant in 2016 as Least Concern, with a declining but not severely fragmented population. It is one of 29 designated game species in Japan, the only birds and mammals that may legally be hunted, and a licence is required. To keep hunting going, prefectures release farm-raised birds every year: Japanese Wikipedia puts the figure at about 100,000 in the 2004 fiscal year, half into protected areas and half into hunting grounds, and in October 2008 the Emperor and Empress released pheasants at the Nasu Imperial Villa. Most released birds are thought to be eaten by predators, and the survivors breed with wild birds, which worries ornithologists because it blurs the regional forms that once lived in different parts of Japan. In the Tokyo metropolitan area, the species is on the local Red List, listed as endangered in the 23 wards.
For more on the money that carried the pheasant for twenty years, read our guide to the currency of Japan; to find Iwate and Okayama on the map, see the list of Japan's prefecture capitals; and for another national bird drawn from the same family of ground-dwelling fowl, compare the story of the national animal of France, the Gallic rooster.