Japanese hare Japanese hare The Japanese hare ("Lepus brachyurus") is a species of hare native to Japan. Coenraad Jacob Temminck described the Japanese hare in 1845. The species name is derived from the Ancient Greek "brachys" "short" and "ouros" "tail". The four subspecies of this hare are: The Japanese hare is reddish-brown, with a body length that ranges from , and a body weight of . Its tail grows to lengths of . Its front legs can be from long and the back legs from long. The ears grow to be long, and the tail long. In areas of northern Japan, the
European rabbit intended meaning. Like the Phoenicians, neither the later Greek nor Roman colonizers had a specific name for the rabbit, because the species is not native to Greece and Italy (though it is present there nowadays). They commonly called it "small hare" and "small digging hare", in contrast to the European hare, which is larger and doesn't make burrows. Catullus used the name "cuniculus" (a latinization of the Iberian word "kiniklos" and the etymological origin of the Castilian name "conejo", Portuguese "coelho" and Catalan "conill", and the old English name, "coney"), and referenced its abundance in Celtiberia by calling this region