Zao Fox Village: A Hillside Full of Foxes in Miyagi

Today was fox day! Zao Fox Village is a hillside forest in Miyagi with more than a hundred foxes just roaming around freely, and you get to walk right in among them.

We started the day early, on the Shinkansen from Aomori down to Sendai with a beef bento for breakfast. We dropped our bags at our Sendai hotel and went straight back to the station for a short hop south on the Yamabiko to Shiroishi-Zao Station.

The fox village is up in the hills, about 20 minutes by taxi from Shiroishi-Zao Station. Buses barely run out here, so the taxi rank outside the station is the way to go. It’s about 4,000 yen one way, so it helps if there are a few of you.

At the entrance, you buy your tickets and get handed a sheet of rules in English. Read it! Most of it boils down to “the foxes will bite you, steal your stuff, or pee on you”. Lol.

Before the foxes, there’s a small area with rabbits, goats and a couple of ponies. Cute, but everyone walks through it a little fast, because you can already see the foxes past the next gate.

Then you go through the gate, and there you are: a forest on a slope, with foxes everywhere you look. Most are red foxes, but there are silver ones and a few that are almost completely white.

In winter, they spend most of the day asleep. They curl up into tight balls with their tails over their noses, on tree stumps, in hollow logs, on the wooden platforms, anywhere there’s a bit of sun. Every stump has an owner.

The ones that were awake were busy patrolling the paths, and every now and then one would stop and stare right at us. We took way too many fox photos this morning, and honestly, we could’ve taken more.

The colours are the surprise. The silver foxes look completely different up close, almost like a different animal, and the white ones are so fluffy they barely look real.

Of course we had to get photos with them too, without touching, as per the rules. The foxes mostly didn’t care.

Up the hill, there’s a small shrine with red torii gates. Foxes are the messengers of Inari, the Shinto god of rice, so it fits right in.

Definitely, if you like animals and don’t mind the trip out. We spent about an hour and a half here and could have stayed longer. Go on a sunny day: the foxes come out onto the paths and platforms to warm up, which is when you get the best photos.

With our phones full of foxes, we took a taxi back down into Shiroishi town for lunch. Onward to Shiroishi Castle!