[4][5][6] C. hodopylax's binomial name derives from the Greek Hodos (path) and phylax (guardian), in reference to Okuri-inu from Japanese folklore, which portrayed wolves or weasels as the protectors of travelers.

[11] Before Dutch zoologist Coenraad Jacob Temminck classified it, it had been long recognized in Japan that Honshu was inhabited by two distinct canids; ōkami (wolf) and yamainu ("mountain dog", likely a type of feral dog), both of which were described by the herbalist Ono Ranzan in his Honzō kōmoku keimō (“An instructional outline of natural studies”) in 1803.

He described the ōkami as an edible, but rapacious, greyish-brown animal with a long, ash-colored, white-tipped tail with webbed toes and triangular eyes that would occasionally threaten people if rabid or hungry.

In contrast, the yamainu was described as a similar animal, but with speckled yellowish fur, unwebbed toes, a foul odor and inedible meat.

In 1842, he wrote a longer description, still confounding the two names, and producing a sketch of a "wolf" based on Siebold's mounted mountain dog specimen.

Skeletal remains of the Japanese wolf have been found in archaeological sites, such as Torihama shell mounds, dating from the Jōmon period (10,000 to 250 B.C).

[20] Remains of the wild native canine dating from the late Edo period (1603 and 1868), the Yama-Inu, has occasionally been confused with the Japanese wolf because of the osteological similarities between the two.

[29] Analyses of the mitochondrial DNA of 1576 dogs worldwide revealed that one Kishu[16][20] and one Siberian husky[16][20] possessed the same haplotype as a Japanese wolf, indicating past cross-breeding.

[40] These aspects led Japanese researchers to indicate that hybridization was severe among wide ranges of the archipelago including Hokkaido, and may disrupt genetic and morphological studies to determine the true C. hodophilax and C.

[20] As above mentioned, descriptions of "ōkami" and "yamainu" by Ono Ranzan don't correspond,[12] and several different "types" of wolves or wolf-like canids in Japanese islands were noted in literatures and reports, indicating these may or may not represent wolfdogs.

[40] For example, there exist a "big and black" one,[48] and ones referred to ohokami or ōkame that were aliases and potential synonyms of ōkami;[8] the former to "have paddles on paws and swim" and to "leave footprints with five claws",[49][50] and the latter to be "slender and long-haired" and could be one of animals kept by Siebold although this could also be a misidentified different canidae such as a dhole or a dog or a hybrid.

One is small and shorter legs, but more primitive and somewhat mustelidae-like appearance, and may represent the art of yamainu kept by Siebold by Kawahara Keiga, depicted with stripes, and the specimen preserved at Ube shrine, claimed to be a C. hodophilax captured in Wakayama in 1949, more than four decades after the last confirmed record.

[56] The last Japanese wolf was captured and killed at Washikaguchi of Higashiyoshino village in Honshu Nara Prefecture, Japan on January 23, 1905.

[57] In the Shinto belief, the ōkami ("wolf") is regarded as a messenger of the kami spirits and also offers protection against crop raiders such as the wild boar and deer.

[60] In Japanese folklore, there is the widely recorded belief of the okuriōkami ("escort wolf") that followed someone walking alone through a forest at night until they reach their home without doing them any harm.

Another belief was of wolves that raised an infant who had been abandoned in the forests of the Kii Peninsula, and later became the clan leader Fujiwara no Hidehira.

Another belief from the Kanto area of eastern Japan was that feeding an infant wolf's milk would make them grow up strong.

In the Tamaki Mountains the location of a tree called “the cypress of dog-howls” is said to be the site where wolves howled immediately before a flood in 1889 warning the villagers,[7] and before the great earthquake of 1923 even though the wolf was extinct by that time.

[63] In Wonderful Pretty Cure!, the main antagonists are vengeful wolf spirits who aim to destroy humanity as revenge for them causing the extinction of their species.

[65] Three of these, a kill within Fukui Castle in 1910[66][67] and two sightings from Chichibu in 1996[65][68] and nearby Mount Sobo in 2000,[69][70] involved closely taken images of each animals and scientific investigations, and a potential audio recording was made in 2018.