There have been more than 220 bear attacks and 13 deaths so far this fiscal year across Japan, by far the most in recorded history. In the last month alone, a 70-year-old man gathering mushrooms was decapitated, a 78-year-old woman was mauled to death while taking out her trash, and a former women’s professional wrestling referee who had retired to work at a rural spa was pulled into the forest and killed while cleaning an outdoor bath. Three people died in the span of a single week.
Non-fatal attacks are happening at a rate of almost one every other day, including a New Zealand-born marathon runner who had both bones of his forearm broken clean through, and an 85-year-old woman who was attacked while washing radishes at a tap outside her farmhouse. One bear, after mauling a man in the city of Yuzawa late last month, holed up in a house for six whole days before it was finally captured by a hunting association. Home and business invasions have become commonplace, with one bear in northwest Tokyo entering a supermarket and clearing out the sushi section.
“Japan likely has the highest number of bear-human incidents in the world,” Koji Yamazaki, a professor of animal ecology at Tokyo University of Agriculture, told The Japan Times.
Since 2008, the number of fatal bear attacks in Japan has averaged about three per year. In the United States, that figure is under 1.5 per year looking at the Lower 48 and around two annually when Alaska is included. The dense populations of both humans and bears and the close proximity of developed areas to bear habitats are likely to blame for the increased number of violent encounters.
The attacks are affecting all parts of Japanese society. A forthcoming movie entitled “Higuma!” or “Brown Bear!” about workers in the gig economy was scheduled to be released this month but is now being pushed back to early next year due to the crisis.
With bear hibernation unlikely to occur until late December, officials are growing increasingly desperate. The governor of Akita Prefecture recently traveled to Tokyo to meet with the Japanese military, known as the Self-Defense Forces (SDF), to get help with the problem. Several news outlets reported that the army would be coming in to help with a bear cull, but to the disappointment of 9-year-old boys everywhere, there will be no tanks rolling in to do battle with swarms of angry brown bears.
SDF interventions will be strictly non-lethal, and forces have now been deployed to Akita to plan for more systematic bear control measures and protection of local bear hunters. This isn’t the first time the Japanese military has scrambled to respond to wildlife threats. Starting in 2011, SDF troops traveled to the northern island of Hokkaido to reduce the overpopulation of sika deer, conducting helicopter reconnaissance missions and transporting deer killed by local hunting associations.
This time around, the SDF will assist in setting up bear traps and will lend other logistical support, but those same licensed hunting associations will be pulling the trigger.
The licensed hunters are also getting a significant bump in pay. The town of Biei [bee-AY] in Hokkaido is now paying bear hunters an hourly rate of 4,000 yen or 26 dollars per hour, up from just 10 dollars an hour in 2011. Hunters who bag a bear in Biei will now earn 60,000 yen or just under 400 dollars per bear, versus about 125 dollars for a bear in 2011. Towns across northern Japan are now offering similar rates, but are struggling to attract hunting associations and are asking for assistance from the national government to cover the costs.
“The underlying issue is that Japan has never really invested the money or effort into wildlife management,” said Shinsuke Koike, head of the Japan Bear Network and a professor at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology. “Up until now, we’ve somehow managed to get by with that approach. But not anymore.”
Interestingly, Japan has some serious bear hunting heritage. The Ainu people of Northern Japan built their entire culture around a yearly bear festival that celebrated successful hunts. Bears were so central to Ainu culture that if hunters killed a sow with cubs, those cubs were often taken from the den and raised in captivity. There are several documented cases of Ainu women nursing bear cubs who were too young to eat solid food.
You also may have pricked up your ears at the name “Akita,” the prefecture in the north of Japan. That name was given to the Akita dog, the famous bear-hunting breed of the Matagi people, who still hunt bears in the protected beech forests of the region. The number of traditional Matagi hunters has been in steep decline over the past several decades, but several of them are now offering their services across Japan.
Who knows, maybe this growing problem will revive some of those hunting practices. And maybe instead of paying professional hunters, Japan might look across the ocean to a place where hunters gladly pay into a system of regulated hunting, and feed themselves in the process.
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