Biogenesis

Copyright © 2015 by Tatsuaki Ishiguro

All rights reserved.

“It is with the Deepest Sincerity that I Offer Prayers …” originally published in Japanese as “Heisei sannen gogatsu futsuka, kotensei meneki fuzen shokogun nite kyusei sareta Akedera Nobuhiko hakushi, narabini,” by Fukutake Shoten, 1994, and republished as “Shinka” in
Shinka
by Haruki Bunko, 2000. “Snow Woman” originally published in Japanese as “Yuki Onna” in
Hitokuibyo
by Haruki Bunko, 2000. Translations by Brian Watson.

“Midwinter Weed” and “The Hope Shore Sea Squirt” originally published in Japanese as “Tojiso” and “Kibo Hoya” in
Tojiso
by Hayakawa Shobo, 2006. Translations by James Balzer.

This is a work of fiction.

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It is with the deepest sincerity that I offer prayers for Dr. Nobuhiko Akedera, who succumbed to the acquired immune deficiency syndrome on May 2, 1991, and Dr. Keiichi Sakakibara, who succumbed to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis on December 25, 1992. Their bereaved families were kind enough to allow me access to their experiment logs and diaries, and I should begin by noting that the passages reproduced in print herein appear by their permission.

It was last December, a mere three weeks before his sudden passing, that I received a letter from Dr. Sakakibara indicating that he wanted to discuss “an unknown side of the extinction of the winged mouse.” I had incurred a debt of gratitude to Dr. Sakakibara regarding research on the winged mouse, but since we had only exchanged New Year’s
greeting cards thereafter, all I had heard was that he was not feeling his best, and the news took me by surprise. We had met once in person, when Dr. Akedera had passed away, but it was the briefest of meetings. In addition to my work in the medical field, I write, and a magazine had asked me to submit an article on the extinction of the winged mouse. I asked Dr. Sakakibara for his cooperation, but he declined in so many words, which is why I was doubly surprised by the turn of events.

When I went to see him in his hospital room, he had already been diagnosed with that difficult illness, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Yet, on the chair by the head of his bed was a mountain of documents threatening to topple over. He was at a point in his illness where he could only move his eyes, and his communications came by way of a word processor that had been specially adapted to amplify ocular movement. His wish was to publicize certain aspects of the extinction of the winged mouse that he had “intentionally hidden.”

Although he was in a state that would have normally
ruled out any visitors, I received permission from the neurological center’s Dr. Mieko Murahashi, who allowed me to see him for a period of just one hour each day.

It was an unusual setting for an interview since “he would not be put on an artificial respirator, and his breathing could stop at any moment” (Dr. Murahashi).

My work proceeded as a series of question-and-answer sessions regarding that mountain of documents. It was very difficult to get everything said within the time allotted to us, and I was often chastised for going over the hour limit. Despite Dr. Sakakibara’s stated wish to share every detail for the sake of posterity, he had very little to say about his own thoughts and feelings, and to this day, I am not sure what had brought about such a resolve in him.

Our work together may have induced pneumonia in Dr. Sakakibara, which might have hastened his passing, for which I feel nothing but regret, but all I can do is to hope that he rests in peace and
that some truth has come from the endeavor.

My work herein is based on those documents he shared with me as well as on the testimony of others connected with the research. Ideally, Dr. Sakakibara’s writings would be published as is for the reader’s benefit, but in their raw form they may invite misunderstandings as to the content’s proper order and continuity, so I decided against it. Hence this piece is divided into four sections, the last of which will present the majority of Dr. Sakakibara’s materials. Considering the circumstances, I believe I am avoiding any egregious missteps, and as this does not aim to be an academic presentation, I hope that the reader will forgive me in advance if, by forgoing scientific inquiry on the level of minutiae, I fail to conform with Dr. Sakakibara’s wishes to the letter.

The environment and species diversity preservation have been receiving greater attention in the last
couple of years, but it was on September 11, 1989 that the winged mouse disappeared from the face of our planet. Although the extinction was covered by the local newspaper, the
Kitasorachi News
, and the area television station, it is most likely that people by and large have heard nothing about it. A small animal native to an enclave in Hokkaido known as Kamuikotan, the winged mouse’s name derived from the fact that two such tiny appendages could be found on its back. Back in the late 1910s and early 1920s, when natural history was just budding in Japan as a discipline, the species was multiplying fast enough to pose a threat to Kamuikotan’s ecosystem. Yet, even in those days, the animals were eschewed as a subject of biological study despite being a rare species because they did not take well to captivity or artificial breeding –– that this would dissuade research may strike our contemporary sensibilities as odd. According to Kiyoshi Takeuchi, a former city hall employee and an amateur naturalist whose longstanding interest in Kamuikotan’s ecosystem centers primarily on its butterflies, “The number of specimens must have drastically fallen at some point even before we had an idea of their population
level. It’s an uncommon case where we missed the opportunity to do research.”
¹

A gorge along National Highway 12 that runs from Sapporo, and situated just before Asahikawa (see
Figure 1
²
), Kamuikotan derives from an Ainu word meaning “gathering place of the gods.” Although nearly all of the place names in Hokkaido, Sapporo included, are based on Ainu, the Chinese characters for Kamuikotan are particularly close to the original meaning. Although National Highway 12 is one of the major arterials in Hokkaido, until its tunnels were completed it was a mountain path flanked by a deep valley on one side. Avalanches had claimed lives almost every year.

Even within Hokkaido, whose ecosystem is distinct from the rest of Japan’s, Kamuikotan, a nearly unexplored area surrounded by virgin forests, boasts singular flora and fauna. While the existence of unique species of butterflies and salamanders have been confirmed, in-depth studies had not been conducted until relatively recently due to the harsh climatic conditions.

Figure 1

Although Mr. Takeuchi has had a number of papers on the butterflies of Kamuikotan published in Western journals, he notes that “Modern-day biology is preoccupied with molecular biology, and there are scant human resources and national funds available for natural history work, so covering all of Kamuikotan’s ecosystem is beyond us.”

Thanks to those conditions, it was only at the Society of Biologists’ annual meeting ten years ago that the winged mouse’s declining numbers and trend toward extinction became a topic of concern. Rodents are mammals with a long history, and, moreover, the most commonly used animals in scientific experiments. As a result, many new species come into being at the laboratory level: pristine strains, a result of purifying genes through extensive inter-breeding, where generation after generation is a copy of its ancestor; the nude mice, without hair and lacking all cellular immunity; transgenic mice that have had external genetic material spliced into them at the developmental stage; dot rats that can only produce offspring with artificial insemination; mole rats, which I will touch on later; truly a vast variety
of them. While many rodent species must be headed to extinction, very little ecological research is being performed on natural breeds due to lack of interest. Unlike with other animals, the emergence and extinction of mouse species is a quotidian fact. To a real extent researchers have become dulled to the issue of extinctions when it comes to mice, and in a sense the winged mouse simply got buried underneath that overall trend.

Things changed dramatically, however, at the Rare Biota Academic Association meeting in Kyoto during the autumn of 1982.
³
The presentation was delivered by a surgeon who had started working in Fukagawa City, near Kamuikotan. Sixty at the time, Dr. Satoru Ishikawa, an avid mountain hiker, had come across the fresh carcass of a winged mouse the preceding year. Dr. Ishikawa had no interest in natural history, and all he knew about the winged mouse was that it was considered a rare species. Still, he brought the dead mouse home with him and attempted a simple dissection, hoping to stuff the animal. In addition, he took photographs and compiled tissue samples. Dr. Ishikawa was in many ways a simple country doctor, but
thirty years prior, working on his degree, he had conducted some experiments on carcinogenic factors using rats.

We will never know if Dr. Ishikawa recalled his university experiments as he cut the skin and opened the abdomen, but he did end up writing his first academic paper in thirty years. The
Neues
, or new knowledge, that Dr. Ishikawa discovered was that the position of the organs in the winged mouse completely differed from that in other rats and mice and, more broadly speaking, mammals in general. The university professors listening to Dr. Ishikawa’s presentation on that autumn day were far more surprised than he was. Questions at the meeting focused on the digestive tract of the winged mouse. The abdomens of most mammals, including humans, are filled with organs dedicated to extracting nutrition. In the case of the winged mouse, however, it was a single short tube that could be the stomach or the large intestine, and even the liver was less than one quarter the size compared to other mouse species. Such a presentation caused a sensation among natural historians. A host of organs whose functions defied traditional
analysis via analogy had been reported with accompanying diagrams. Although it was impossible to decipher more from Ishikawa’s tissue samples, the fact that he had provided evidence of “the winged mouse’s peculiarity as a mammal” triggered a great boom in winged mouse research.

One month after the paper’s publication in English
⁴
(it was to become the only English-language article), Dr. Ishikawa suddenly went missing (while mountain hiking, it is said, though the details are obscure). Meanwhile, winged mouse research took off on a massive scale. Naturally, researchers must have hoped that any finding related to the winged mouse would make for a world-class paper. For a certain period, inns and hotels in Asahikawa, Fukagawa, and other cities near Kamuikotan were booked solid for the first time since opening their doors, and overflowed with people determined to capture a winged mouse. The bizarre state of things can be gleaned from a testimony that found its way into the local paper: “Renting out the lobby sofas has become part of our business” (Fukagawa Plaza Hotel).

It did not take long, however, for everyone to realize that they were too late. Although a lack of organized searches could not have helped, winged mice were not to be found no matter where in the virgin forests of Kamuikotan people looked. Soon some of them began to leave. The particulars of this denouement were reported in a boxed article in the
Kitasorachi News
⁵
and caught the eye of Seitaro Tamura. The mayor of Fukagawa at the time, he was struggling to find a way to expend the 100 million yen that the Takeshita cabinet was bestowing on rural cities to revitalize their economies. Mr. Tamura hit upon the notion of preserving the winged mouse and other Kamuikotan species. It seems that his intent was to build and open a center in order to attract tourists to his city, whose residents were ever moving away. Of course, building such a facility with only 100 million yen was impossible, and it is said that the determined efforts of a Diet representative hailing from Fukagawa helped expedite the project.

Around that time, quite opportunely, the school nurse at Fukagawa Elementary, Ms. Shizue Oshima, took her pupils out on a field trip. She managed
to capture a winged mouse eating some bog moss by a pond. Ms. Oshima had accomplished the feat as a child too (catching two winged mice at once), making her the only person on record ever to have captured a winged mouse on more than one occasion. In an article in the
Kitasorachi News
reporting on the incident, Ms. Oshima is quoted as saying: “I felt it was easier the other time when I caught two, even though it was at night.” Dr. Akedera would zoom in on this bit as we shall see later.

Transferred to the Species Preservation Center, which had been built over a period of six months on the site of an old elementary school, the male winged mouse was given the rather comical name of Ponta (from the local Pon River;
pon
is Ainu) and kept in a narrow cage, with an eye to breeding rather than for academic purposes.

At the same time, Mr. Tamura sent notices to educational and zoological institutions throughout Japan advertising the availability of the center’s directorship. There was a surprisingly large number of applications, and the city council strongly favored Professor Hajime Watanabe from the Tokyo
College of Engineering for his achievements and Ms. Tsuya Kikuchi of the Association for the Conservation of Nature for her name recognition. Support for a local researcher served as the pretext for Mr. Tamura’s somewhat high-handed recommendation and ultimate selection of Keiichi Sakakibara, who had just retired as a professor from the Hokkaido College of Animal Husbandry.

Upon taking up the position, Dr. Sakakibara performed detailed observations of the winged mouse’s behavior and presented a paper on the subject, but at Mr. Tamura’s request, he also submitted a general summary, together with photographs, to the magazine
Ecology
for a wider audience (see
Figure 2
).