Zao Fox Village
📍 Miyagi, Shiroishi
A mountain forest in Miyagi where more than a hundred fluffy foxes roam free around you — red, silver, and arctic-white — dozing in heaps and cheerfully ignoring every rule posted about them.
Up a winding road in the Miyagi mountains is a forest that belongs to the foxes. Zao Fox Village keeps more than a hundred foxes — red, silver, platinum, and snow-white arctic — in a large open enclosure you walk through, surrounded on all sides by tails, ears, and suspiciously knowing eyes.
Why It’s Interesting
Foxes are usually impossible to see up close; here they’re everywhere, sprawled in fuzzy piles, trotting between the trees, and lining up wherever feed might fly. They are emphatically not tame pets — they’re wild animals that have decided humans are a reliable snack source — which makes the whole place equal parts heart-melting and slightly anarchic. In winter, snow on a dozing red fox is pure storybook.
Best Time to Visit
Cute in every season, but winter delivers the iconic snow-fox scene, and spring brings fox kits (and limited, supervised holding events).
Getting There
It’s remote and badly served by transit — most people taxi or drive from Shiroishi-Zao Station. Follow the posted rules to the letter: feed only by tossing from the marked spot, and keep your belongings close.
🐿️ Cinnamon was here
Field report
Zao Fox Village required a formal risk assessment: me, a squirrel, walking into a mountain forest where a hundred-plus foxes roam free. The board (me, Socks by correspondence) approved the mission with conditions, all of which I ignored immediately upon seeing the winter fluff.
The foxes are magnificent layabouts — red, silver, arctic-white, dozing in heaps like spilled scarves, cheerfully ignoring every posted rule about where foxes should be. Visitors walk marked paths; foxes treat the paths as suggestions and the visitors as scenery. I toured via the elevated walkway and fence tops, which I recommend to all guests of my tax bracket.
Winter is peak fluff and peak drama (fox squabbles sound like arguments between kettles). Follow the feeding rules; they exist for reasons with teeth. Unforgettable, slightly lawless, deeply fluffy. Four acorns, held at altitude.
— Cinnamon 🐿️
📸 Cinnamon's camera roll
Snapshots from our very good boy on the road.
Where it is
You might also like
Okunoshima (Rabbit Island)
Aoshima Cat Island
Zao Onsen & the Okama Crater
Zao Snow Monsters (Juhyo)
Nearby discoveries
Yamadera (Risshaku-ji)
Kaminoyama Castle & Onsen
Yamagata Hanagasa Festival
Bunshokan (Former Yamagata Prefectural Office)
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