Shortly after noon on 14 August, a staff member of the Natural Parks Foundation's Tottori branch was driving the Daisen prefectural loop road when he saw bread. Thirty loaves stood along roughly a hundred metres of guardrail near Daisenji temple, spaced out rather than piled. They were larger than the loaves sold in supermarkets, and the first haul weighed 16.7 kilograms.
It kept coming. Another 11.8 kilograms turned up over the following two days, at the same stretch and at other points nearby. On the morning of 19 August it was not bread but 1.3 kilograms of chicken liver, set out in five separate piles on a roadside pull-off and looking fresh, the sort sold in a shop. On the morning of 20 August there was bread again, 10.5 kilograms of it. Four days, thirty-nine kilograms.
The road runs past the trailhead for Mount Daisen, at 1,729 metres the highest point in the Chugoku region, near the boundary between the Tottori Prefecture towns of Daisen and Houki and inside Daisen-Oki National Park. The spot sits around 800 metres up. Nobody lives there. By day it is busy with hikers; at night the traffic stops, on wheels and on foot alike. Once the bread kept coming back, the foundation reported it to the Environment Ministry, to Tottori Prefecture and to the prefectural police as a malicious case of illegal dumping.
What unsettles the people who found it is the arrangement. Shoichiro Hiraki, who heads the foundation's Daisen section, points out that someone dumping rubbish throws it into a gully or otherwise covers their tracks. Here nothing was hidden. The food was in the open, at regular intervals, along a rail. "I can sense an intention to have it eaten," he said.
Deer are common around Daisen, and so are Asian black bears; encounters are not unusual. Hiraki's concern is what happens if wild animals learn that a roadside is a place where food appears: an animal that loses its wariness of people can end in injuries and in traffic accidents. None of that has happened yet. Nor, in four days of finds, was anyone seen leaving the food, and no animal was recorded at it.