“A foul-smelling, ape-faced wildman that haunted a Hiroshima mountain through the early 1970s.”
For roughly four years in the early 1970s, the forested country around Mount Hiba in northern Hiroshima Prefecture had a resident mystery: the Hibagon, a squat, ape-like figure about a metre and a half tall, reported again and again by local residents of what is now Shobara City. The descriptions agreed on the essentials — a stocky body under black, gray, or dark brown hair, a face like an inverted triangle, glaring eyes — and on one more thing: it always ran.
The wave was serious enough that in 1971 the local government opened a special office to receive and investigate reports — a rare bureaucratic honor for a cryptid — and closed it again in 1975 as the sightings dried up. No one was ever hurt: witnesses consistently described a creature that fled from people, in one case retreating from four armed residents without a gesture of menace. The Hibagon vanished as abruptly as it arrived, leaving footprints and a lasting local legend.
The Legend
The first reports came in July 1970 from the hills around Mount Hiba, in the high border country where Hiroshima meets the San'in region. Witnesses described an upright-walking ape roughly 1.5 metres tall with a heavy build and hair of black, gray, or dark brown, and a face that stuck in the memory: an inverted triangle set with upward-slanting eyes. A 1972 account gave it a chocolate-brown face and brown hair, and some tellings add strange, dolphin-like cries in the woods.
Among the recorded encounters, witnesses named in accounts include a Mr. Sazawa and a Mrs. Harada, and in no report did the creature show hostility — the armed party of four saw only its back as it fled. Japanese Boy Scouts found footprints 25 centimetres long and 15 centimetres wide pressed into the ground. The Hibagon behaved, in short, less like a monster than like a shy animal running out of forest to hide in.
Documented Sightings
The sighting wave clustered between 1970 and 1974, dense enough that the municipal government established its special reporting office in 1971 — likely the only monster desk in Japanese local bureaucracy — and logged the claims as they came in. Reports thinned after 1974, and the office closed in 1975. For those few years the quiet farming district drew reporters and monster-hunters from across Japan, all hoping to catch the country's own Bigfoot in the beam of a flashlight.
The story had an epilogue. Years after the Mount Hiba reports ceased, similar creatures were described in the neighboring village of Yamano — promptly dubbed 'yamagon' — before those sightings, too, stopped by 1980, prompting speculation that the Hibagon had simply moved on. Proposed explanations ran from a large Japanese macaque or a bear to a fugitive human, a relative of the yeti, and, inevitably, extraterrestrials. Nothing was ever caught, photographed conclusively, or identified.
The Lore
The Hibagon arrived at a suggestive moment: the early 1970s were the high tide of global Bigfoot enthusiasm, and the Japanese press treated the Hiroshima wildman as a homegrown sasquatch, with researchers drawing the comparison to the yeti and the North American giant explicitly. Skeptics answered that a bear standing upright in dim mountain light needs no new zoology — but the footprints, the office files, and the consistency of the descriptions kept the question open in local memory.
Shobara eventually embraced its monster. The Hibagon endures as a beloved local character in the region's folklore and tourism, and its story has settled into its final shape as Japan's definitive wildman flap: brief, harmless, bureaucratically documented, and never explained. Half a century on, the inverted-triangle face still peers out of souvenir stands in the town it once frightened.
Field Notes
- ✦ A cluster of encounters between 1970 and 1974 led the local government to open a special reporting office in 1971.
- ✦ Witnesses consistently mentioned an overpowering odor accompanying the creature.
- ✦ It became a regional mascot of sorts after the sighting wave subsided.
- ✦ Boy Scouts found footprints 25 cm long and 15 cm wide; no hostile behavior was ever reported.
- ✦ Later reports from neighboring Yamano village were dubbed 'yamagon' and ceased by 1980.
Case File
- Classification
- Wildman / unknown primate
- Category
- Humanoid/Wildman
- Territory
- Mount Hiba, Hiroshima Prefecture
- First Sighted
- July 1970
- Habitat
- Forested mountains around Mount Hiba
- Reported Size
- Around 1.5-1.7 m
- Also Known As
- Hinagon · Japanese Bigfoot