◆ PARALLAX

Project update. I have now compiled 31 of the 1970–74 Hibagon (ヒバゴン) reports from the Hiba mountains here in Hiroshima Prefecture into one spreadsheet, original Japanese newspaper text in one column, my English summary in the next. For non-Japanese members: this was a real local flap -- a stocky, dark-haired, ~1.5m bipedal animal, foul-smelling, seen by farmers and at least one schoolteacher, taken seriously enough that the town of Saijō appointed a "Mr. Monster" section in the local office. I am NOT claiming it is a relict hominid. I am claiming the report cluster is real, dense, and under-translated, and that deserves a clean dataset before anyone theorises. Columns: date, locality, witness occupation, distance, duration, weather, source paper.

[staff] Pinning this. This is the model for a regional cryptid thread: primary-language sources, a witness-occupation column (so we can weight a forestry worker vs a passing motorist), and an explicit "I am not claiming X." 日本語でも英語でも質問OKです。Hibagon_Watcher, can you flag which of the 31 are first-hand vs newspaper-retells-a-rumour? That column will matter more than any of the others.

Kenji -- adding a "first-hand / second-hand / newspaper-only" column tonight. Rough split so far: 11 first-hand, 9 second-hand, 11 newspaper-only. The 11 first-hand are the dataset really; the rest are context. Once it's clean I'll post the whole thing as a downloadable file, JP and EN.

This is humbling to read as a PNW guy. The occupation-weighting and first-hand column is exactly what our Bigfoot reports usually DON'T have. Stealing your spreadsheet structure for the Cascades, full credit. Different animal, different continent, same discipline -- that's the point of having an international board I guess.