Bears have killed 17 people in Japan this year. Locals are arming up

No-one knows for sure exactly how many bears there are in Japan, but they're on the move — and they're not afraid of humans.

When Araki Osamu first heard reports a bear had been seen in the streets of his home town, a 1-hour bullet train ride north of Tokyo, he dismissed it as "fake news".

It was unbelievable, he thought, that a bear could be running around downtown Utsunomiya, a city of 500,000 and capital of Tochigi prefecture.

But by that evening, news spread that the 100-kilogram Asian black bear had been spotted in an arcade at the heart of city's busiest shopping district and this time there was proof.

"Security camera footage showed the bear," the 52-year-old says. "So, I realised it must be true."

Shortly afterwards he received a message from his boss, the chairman of the local kindergarten where Araki is an administrator, asking him to buy bear-repellent spray as a "safety measure for the children".

It is an aerosol can filled with capsaicin and capsaicinoids made from finely ground hot chilli. The aerosol blasts the substance up to 10 metres and burns the bear's eyes, nose and lungs causing temporary blindness and hopefully avoiding an attack. Sales of the spray have skyrocketed.

While Araki was at a local outdoor store buying cans of bear repellent, almost 100 schools, including Wind and Green Kindergarten where he works, closed as a multi-day hunt for the bear got underway.

"As one bear has been sighted in this area, we recognise that it's possible two or three might appear in the future," he says, standing in a large outdoor playground in the middle of the oval-shaped kindergarten.

"Our kindergarten is taking a proactive approach to preparing for such situations."

The bear terrorising Utsunomiya was eventually caught after multiple sightings across the city, including one sighting just kilometres from Wind and Green Kindergarten.

News cameras were filming from the sky and the ground as the bear was tranquillised and loaded into the back of a truck.

The dramatic few days speak to a broader issue in Japan: what to do with "urban bears", as they have been dubbed.

A bear out there

Bears encroaching on towns and cities have become a big problem in Japan.

Bears are most prolific in the northern half of Japan. The Asian black bear, like the one that was roaming the streets of Utsunomiya, are found largely on the country's main island of Honshu, with the population particularly high in the north-eastern Tohuku region. Hokkaido, Japan's second biggest island, famed for its powder snow and wilderness, is home to the Ussuri brown bear, a species which is bigger and considered more aggressive.

Official data says 17 people have been killed and about 250 injured since April last year including at least four deaths in the past four months. The numbers are the highest recorded since tracking began in the early 2000s.

Last year, more than 50,000 bear sightings were reported, a historic high, and there are concerns the number could be bigger this year, after 1,000 sightings were recorded between January and March, nearly double the number for the same period last year.

To give a sense of how significant the problem has become, bears rarely kill more than one or two people a year in countries such as the US and Canada, both of which have large populations of black, brown and polar bears.

As the problem escalates, the Japanese government has faced pressure to act. Last year the Japan Self-Defence Forces, the pacifist country's version of the military, was deployed to set traps, patrol residential areas and remove bears. Firearm regulations have been loosened.

Now the government is going even further. Plans to cull thousands of bears and triple the number of people capturing the animals will be part of a strategy to work with local hunting associations and wildlife businesses to reduce bear numbers, potentially by more than 30 per cent in some parts of Japan.

In a country where bears are traditionally revered, particularly by the indigenous Ainu people, a national policy to kill them can be a difficult step.

And many argue that Japan's urban bear problem is less about the growing numbers and more about the way Japan is changing.

Bears move in

The city gives way quickly and easily to the countryside around Utsunomiya. Over the course of just a few hundred metres, lines of restaurants and buildings are replaced with rice paddies.

White egrets casually stroll through the water among the tidy rows of green shoots, oblivious to the cars passing on the road alongside them.

The mountains to the city's north-west seem to roll seamlessly into the farmland, dotted with once-loved houses, and the fields into the bustling city centre.

In most parts of the world, growing interactions between humans and wild animals are caused by the decline of natural habitats as urban areas expand.

But Japan has the opposite problem.

The population of Japan has been going backwards for almost two decades. In the past five years alone the number of Japanese fell by about 3 million people.

And in regional towns and their rural outskirts, this decline is particularly acute. Across the country almost 9 million homes are empty, with about half of those completely abandoned. Known as "akiya", it is projected that in another decade one in three houses could stand empty.

For bears, these abandoned areas have extended traditional habitats and are a key issue behind increased sightings and attacks, says associate professor Yamauchi Kiyoshi, a bear expert from Iwate University.

Abandoned and overgrown farmland in these areas has "effectively merged with the mountains where the bears live," Yamauchi says.

"In these cases, they tend to wander into town centres and, without realising it, end up venturing too far into the city, finding themselves unable to make their way back.

"From the wildlife's perspective, it's as if they've been walking through the forest and suddenly found themselves in a settlement where people live."

If the bear panics in the new environment, attacks are more likely, he says: "They might start attacking people one after another."

The issue is magnified, Yamauchi says, when paired with food shortages in the mountains. Bears largely live off beechnuts and acorns, but how many there are varies season by season. Climate change is making the extremes of the seasons worse. If there is not enough food in the mountains, the bears go looking for alternatives.

In 2025 there were severe acorn and beechnut crop failures in the wild, leading to the historically high number of bear attacks and sightings.

The bears have "learned there's food to be found" in towns and cities, Yamauchi says, and have become "quite indifferent" to the sounds of people or cars.

It is not unusual for bears to come into his university grounds; sometimes they are seen "rummaging through rubbish".

"There were also incidents last year where they ate pet food; in fact, in one instance, after eating the pet food, the bear ended up eating the pet as well."

A mask and a plan: preparing for a bear intrusion

Just weeks after the bear was captured in Utsunomiya, local officials and emergency responders from the prefecture came together to practise what to do if a bear ventured into urban streets.

They gathered at an out-of-service school a 45-minute drive from the city, the site both a reminder of the underlying problem and part of the response, converted into a training ground for the day.

Beside a three-storey blue building which once housed classrooms of children, two tents were erected to serve as mission control. Police, in helmets and carrying shields, mixed with local government officers in fluoro vests, and local hunters. The organisers wielded clipboards and megaphones.

Then one man pulled on a black rubber bear mask and walked to the other end of the former playground, to get on all fours and play the part of the animal. He took his position in front of a goat pen, prompting curious glances from its horned occupants.

The urban bear problem has forced people in Japan to take some extraordinary measures. But the scenario was now set: a bear loitering near a school. The team must respond.

In the wake of recent bear attacks, Japan loosened its strict gun laws to make it easier for hunters to shoot in residential areas. It allows the emergency use of guns, based on the judgement of local officials.

"As implementing these emergency measure requires various preparatory steps, such as the evacuation of residents, we are conducting response drills to review the entire sequence of procedures," Maruyama Tetsuya from the prefecture's wildlife and game management team says.

Running the simulation, and featuring the man playing the bear, was designed to give everyone a "more realistic understanding of the situation".

After launching a drone to monitor the "bear", conducting mock welfare checks, and calling in police, a hunter is escorted to the top storey of the old school building, where he successfully "shoots" the bear below. On cue, the masked man falls face down in the grass.

So far, this region has not seen a big increase in bear attacks, but Maruyama is concerned that could change, given what is happening in other parts of the country.

"There is a possibility that such sightings in urban areas may increase in Tochigi prefecture in the future, so we're conducting this drill to prepare for such eventualities."

The Japanese government has been under pressure to act after last year's attacks, and in addition to the new emergency laws, has now released a "road map" for bear management.

The plan includes provisional "capture targets" for different areas based on current population estimates. The vast majority of "captured" bears are shot or euthanased, with the government's road map including information on how to bury and dispose of these "captured" bears.

Bear culling is a long-standing management practice, but these targets are new.

The government's road map estimates the number of bears in the Kanto region, which Tochigi prefecture is part of, to be 2,983 and it sets a "capture target" of 600 for this financial year, with a plan to have a population of 2,000 bears here in four years.

Nationally, it estimates there are 57,793 bears in Japan currently, and it wants to reduce that to 39,600 by the year 2030.

Maruyama says it has "become clear" the bear population is growing at a faster rate than previously thought.

"As humans are virtually the only predator for bears, I believe it is necessary to maintain the population at a reasonable level given that the numbers are set to increase."

The provisional culling targets are designed to reduce the bear population "where it has grown too large", based on an estimated natural increase rate of 14.5 per cent.

But Yamauchi from Iwate University questions the figures used to calculate that rise. While he said the numbers were "increasing steadily" in some areas, including the Kanto region which takes in Tochigi, he argues that nationally the "population isn't exactly exploding".

Bear census needed

No-one knows for sure how many bears there are in Japan. The government is installing hundreds of cameras in mountains in the northern part of hard-hit Tohoku to try to get a better idea. Jars of honey and wine are being hung in front of the lenses to encourage the bears to stand on their hind legs and expose a distinguishing white chest mark, which is unique to each animal.

It will take years for the new census program to be conducted nationwide, but the annual culling targets are being introduced from this year.

Yamauchi has spent almost a decade teaching and researching bears, and five years serving as an adviser to the Asiatic Black Bear Research Society.

He is exasperated explaining that even with accurate current figures, tracking population growth is deeply flawed, because previous methods were so unsophisticated.

"The way they counted bears [in the past] was simply by having hunters walk through the mountains and count the number of bear tracks and droppings," he explains.

"They were forcing a figure out of that, so the estimates were massively underestimated."

Comparing current numbers to that data makes it seem like the black bear population has "skyrocketed" he said, but "that isn't actually the case".

Globally, the Asian black bear is considered a species "vulnerable" to extinction, because of habitat loss and poaching, particularly in South-East Asia and China.

While Yamauchi believes the population in Japan is increasing, even if by what rate is unclear, he said there was a "danger" in focusing too heavily on culling.

"They aren't an animal with a particularly high reproduction rate, after all."

The government's plan also includes proposals to conserve bear habitats and try to improve the buffers with towns and cities, with measures like installing "intrusion prevention fences" and managing neglected fruit trees.

But Yamauchi questions whether the culling targets are even achievable. He said the number of bears killed in Japan each year varied significantly, based on whether they came into cities looking for food or not, because they could be so hard to hunt in the wild.

He argues culling should be more targeted.

"For instance, they might say, 'This place is really dangerous, so let's allocate a bit more funding for culling here.'"

But there has been "absolutely no discussion of that".

Who will cull the bears?

At a rifle range outside Utsunomiya, a special training day is being held for local hunters, to offer information and advice about hunting bears. Japan is heavily dependent on hobbyist hunters for wildlife control, but most of them shoot ducks or deer.

A hunter from the northern prefecture of Iwate, where bears are more prolific, has been brought in to give a lecture.

"It is an undeniable fact that the number of skilled hunters capable of hunting with firearms has fallen significantly due to the aging of our hunting community," Nishimura Shoji tells the room.

As a projector plays videos from recent bear hunts, filmed on go-pro cameras attached to the hunter's head, Nishimura laments that the skills required to track a bear are being lost, as older hunters die.

"This failure to pass on [the skills] is likely a factor in the decline in bear catches, a decline caused by human society itself," he says.

After the lecture the local hunters gather to discuss the next part of the training day, a target shooting session. As they are preparing, Nishimura says "urban bears" aren't afraid of humans and "are becoming increasingly aggressive".

"I feel that if this situation continues, the risk of humans being killed or injured will increase."

He believes the government's capture rates are achievable if increased trapping and baiting are combined with hunting.

The hunters move to the rifle range, where a printed picture of a bear has been attached to a moving target. They go into the range in groups of two.

Among those taking part in the training is 75-year-old Otsuka Shigeru. He largely hunts ducks, and shoots clay pigeons. Sitting in a room next to the range after finishing his turn, he smiles easily. He is enjoying the training, despite being slightly confused about why he is here. There are no mountains or bears in his corner of Tochigi prefecture, he explains. But an attendance request came from the prefecture to his city, and he was told "go anyway".

Otsuka has been a hunter for more than 50 years, and in that time, he believes the number of hunters in his area has fallen from 1,000 to about 100. He says there have always been bears on the outskirts of Utsunomiya, but in the past, they were hunted and that kept incidents down.

"There used to be plenty of hunters back then. Nowadays there are so few hunters, that's why it's no good."

Otsuka has friends who hunt bears, but he is in two minds about whether he could do it himself. He initially says he would like to give it a try, but he has reservations. He recalls a conversation he had with the head of another hunting association who told him bears are "mountain gods".

"I'm not sure what to do. After hearing they're the gods of the mountains, I don't really want to shoot them," he says.

Armed with repellent

In the main foyer of the rifle range, a display of bear repellents is set up, showcasing noise and light makers to cans of the spray.

The salesman set up behind the tables of merchandise, Sugiyama Kazunori, works for a security company, TOSNET, which started stocking bear protection products last year, when the increased sightings started driving up demand.

The bear repellent spray is a top seller.

"We already have customers purchasing them in batches of 100 bottles or more," he explains.

Back at his kindergarten, Araki Osamu has four freshly purchased cans of the spray.

He has decided to place two on the buses that take the children to and from the kindergarten, as well as at the entrances to the building. At the front gate, a can emblazoned with a drawing of a roaring bear is now positioned next to a pole that could be used to fend off an animal.

"We informed all the teaching staff on the same day that we are implementing these bear-prevention measures to ensure the safety of the children," he says.

"This is the first time this has happened."

More than a week after the bear was captured, Araki still cannot quite believe it. He pauses remembering the vision "showing a bear crossing the streets". As he reflects on the memory Araki shakes his head and sums up his feelings: "Shocking," he says.

Credits

Words: Natalie Whiting and Akane Saiki

Editing: Catherine Taylor

Illustrations: Lindsay Dunbar

Posted Sun 12 Jul 2026 at 4:45am

Sun 12 Jul 2026 at 4:45am

, updated Sun 12 Jul 2026 at 5:50am

Sun 12 Jul 2026 at 5:50am