🦊 A security camera at a house in Yonago, in Tottori Prefecture in western Japan, caught an odd scene one night. A wild fox walked onto the artificial lawn with a mole in its mouth, dropped it, stayed for about an hour without eating it, and left. By the resident's count, the fox has now come by about seven times.

"It's Like a Zoo"

BSS San-in Broadcasting aired the footage in a report published on September 23, 2026. The fox enters from the top right of the frame and lets the mole fall onto the turf. The mole seems to be trying to crawl away, but the fox doesn't chase it. It just stays put, then slips off into the dark.

The resident has also woken up to find a dead mole in the garden. Asked for a reaction, the resident kept it short: "It's like a zoo."

BSS says its newsroom has received many reports this year of foxes in Yonago's residential streets.

The Internet Went Straight to Gon

The BSS report doesn't mention it, but many people online thought of the same story right away: Gon-gitsune (Gon, the Little Fox) by Nankichi Niimi. On Hatena Bookmark, a Japanese social bookmarking site, one user was surprised the report never brought it up.

Niimi wrote the story as a teenager, and it ran in the January 1932 issue of the children's magazine Akai Tori (Red Bird). It has been in Japanese elementary school textbooks since 1956. According to the Chunichi Shimbun, it has long been taught in fourth grade and is said to have been read by more than 70 million people.

A mischievous little fox named Gon regrets a prank he played on a villager named Hyoju and starts secretly bringing food to his house: chestnuts he gathers, and on one day a few matsutake mushrooms too. For many people in Japan, a fox leaving food at someone's door is something they first met in a fourth-grade classroom.

Foxes have a religious job, too. Fushimi Inari Taisha puts the number of Inari shrines across Japan at about 30,000, and foxes are considered messengers of the Inari deity. The shrine adds that those messengers are invisible white foxes, not the ones living in the hills. The Yonago fox is presumably off duty.

A Mole Expert Suspects Sun-Drying

BSS asked Shin-ichiro Kawada, a senior researcher in the zoology department of the National Museum of Nature and Science, who has studied moles for about 30 years.

Foxes do eat moles, according to Japan's Ministry of the Environment as cited by BSS. But Kawada said moles have a distinct and not very pleasant smell, and foxes are generally thought not to like them much.

His research has led him to a hypothesis. Dead moles tend to turn up in sunny spots, so perhaps foxes carry them there to dry, the way drying makes human food tastier. Mole meat is lean and not very good, he said, and a spell in the sun might be the fox's way of cooking it. Kawada called it an interesting idea and said he wished someone would test it. It remains unproven. BSS noted that the turf where this mole was dropped gets plenty of sun.

So maybe not atonement, just meal prep. One Hatena user wondered whether Gon had been sun-drying those chestnuts all along.

A Fox Cub That Didn't Run

The same report also showed night footage from a dog walk on the bank of the Hino River in Yonago. A fox cub stands right in front of the dog and makes no attempt to flee, as if used to people. Whether anyone had been feeding it isn't known.

Foxes are timid by nature, the city of Sapporo notes. The town of Hidaka in Hokkaido warns that foxes that learn food comes easily keep moving closer to people, rummage around homes, and get hit by cars. According to BSS, Tottori Prefecture asks residents not to get too close to wild foxes or feed them, citing infection risk among other reasons.

Foxes can carry Echinococcus, a tapeworm whose eggs can cause serious liver disease if swallowed. A 2014 report from Japan's National Institute of Infectious Diseases said its endemic area in Japan was limited to Hokkaido. The same report, though, described an infected stray dog caught on Aichi Prefecture's Chita Peninsula in 2014, and the city of Handa says more positive dogs have turned up there since. None of this means the Yonago fox is sick. It does mean the fox is best enjoyed from a distance, without snacks.

Gift or Meal Prep?

Plenty of cat owners know the doorstep delivery. If an animal left something at your door, would you take it as a thank-you, or as somebody's lunch set out to dry?

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