Rabies is a zoonotic disease that causes severe destruction to the central nerve system which is usually fatal. It is one of the most important disease around the world and particular in Asia because of the high costs of prevention and post-exposure treatment. After the recurrence of sylvatic rabies in 1993, the number of raccoon dog mediating rabies cases in Korea has maintained annually until 2011. To better understand the current rabies epidemics in Korea, Korean rabies isolate (SKRBV0601GY) from Gyeonggi province in 2006 was compared with previous isolates in Korea and with isolates originating from the North-East Asia, such as Japan, China and Russia, based on complete nucleoprotein (N) gene sequences. By comparison of the N genes among these viruses, SKRBV0601GY revealed that nucleotide similarity ranged from 97.7 to 99.7%, 96.4 to 97.5%, 91.4 to 96.3%, 89.2 to 90% and 86.1 to 88.1% with Korean isolates, "Arctic-like-2" viruses, "Arctic" viruses, Russian group C - E and Chinese isolates, respectively. Phylogenetic analyses of the isolates revealed that the Korean isolate in 2006 belonged to Korean group B. The topology of the phylogenetic tree of Korean isolates related not the species and year of isolation but the geological location of the virus isolates. All of the Korean isolates showed close relationship to the "Arctic-like-2" virus (Russian group B) more than the "Arctic" virus (Russian group A) and all of the Chinese isolates (Chinese group A, B and C). The "Arctic-like-2" virus group contains the Japanese isolate and Russian group B viruses, originating from the south of East Siberia and Far East in Russia. These molecular data demonstrated that the current rabies epizootic in Korea developed independently of Chinese groups and originated from the "arctic-like-2" viruses in detail.