MINAKAMI — The hunter feels forced to lie to the 12 deities of the mountain. At the foot of the forests of Minakami, in Japan’s central Gunma Prefecture, all the elders know that the Yama-no-Kami, who watch over the trees and animals, can be quiet envious. Beware of their wrath if another beauty ventures into their woods!
“When I pray before going hunting, I can’t say that a woman is accompanying me. So, I lie,” says Moriyoshi Takayanagi, one of the region’s last bear hunters.
The 71-year-old hunter is sitting on the floor of his tiny living room, beneath paper shooting targets pinned to the wall and photographs of himself carrying large game. Takayanagi says there aren’t many men left to venture into the wild slopes around Lake Okutone. So last year, he began training a local woman in hunting and shooting: “It’s the first time I’ve done this, but we don’t have a choice.”
For the latest news & views from every corner of the world, Worldcrunch Today is the only truly international newsletter. Sign up here.
Japan now has fewer than 170,000 licensed hunters — down from 500,000 in the early 1980s. Three-quarters are 50 or older.
Most hunters only go out for small game. “Here, there are only three of us left who can hunt bears, when there were ten of us ten years ago,” the seasoned professional says regretfully. “And yet, we have never received so many calls to capture or eliminate all the animals who now come down from the mountain.”
Takayanagi scrolls on his smartphone through videos of his latest catch near Minakami: a large black bear caught in a rudimentary trap made of a long steel barrel, lying on the ground in the grass. The animal enters it without suspicion to eat honey and then a grate falls behind it, blocking the only exit.
“We first try to relocate the captured animals far from the houses. But if they come back and are considered a threat, we have to shoot them,” the hunter says, taking a black fur out of a box that has just come back from the tanner.
Japan has never experienced something like this. In the administrative year ending last April, Japanese authorities recorded 219 bear attacks across the country — a record since the government began compiling statistics. Six people died while dozens of others were disfigured or left permanently disabled.
A long-standing fear and conflict
Among the victims were hikers near Mount Daisengen, a jogger in Minakami, a teenage girl at a bus stop in the middle of the city of Kitaakita, and an elderly man, who was attacked last May in his living room in Annaka, 110 kilometers north of Tokyo.
I see them near my mushroom spots. Sometimes, it’s right by the city.
“When I started hunting, 50 years ago, I had to trek for two days to find a bear,” says Takayanagi. “Now, I’m walking just for a few minutes and I see them near my mushroom spots. Sometimes, it’s right by the city.”
The archipelago has a long history of conflicts between bears and humans. Documentaries and the famous novel Kuma Arashi recount the attack of a gigantic brown bear in Sankebetsu, on the island of Hokkaido, in December 1915. In three days, the animal killed seven people, including children and a pregnant woman. This tragedy helped fuel the fear of bears in Japan’s collective unconscious throughout the 20th century.
In the 1960s, when the country’s population increased and widespread housing construction started to encroach on the countryside, the authorities of several prefectures with large forests launched the first major extermination campaigns, targeting bears as they were emerging from hibernation.
Tens of thousands of animals were killed up until the 1990s, from brown bears — distant cousins of the powerful American grizzly — weighing more than 400 kg (882 lbs), in Hokkaido, to smaller Asian black bears, which live in the hills of Honshu, the country’s main island, where Tokyo is located.
With the emergence of ecological awareness in the 1990s, Japanese authorities put an end to the carnage, allowing the bear populations to gradually recover. Hokkaido is now home to nearly 12,000 brown bears, while prefectures in the northeast of the country are said to have more than 40,000 black bears — three times more than in 2010.
“No one has an exact idea of the number of specimens, but we know for sure that they are more and more of them,” says Shinsuke Koike, a professor at the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, who notes that bears are irremediably taking over lands formerly occupied by humans.
Rapid depopulation in the countryside
As Japan’s fertility rate collapses, with only 1.2 children per woman in 2023, its population is now shrinking by nearly 900,000 people per year. While a handful of cities, such as Tokyo, still manage to attract a few new residents, rural areas are experiencing rapid depopulation. The heavily forested prefectures of Akita and Aomori, where many bears live, have already lost a quarter of their population since 1990. By 2050, this figure is expected to reach 40%. By then, one in two residents of Akita will be over 65 years old.
“Due to this collapse in births and rapid aging, humans are gradually leaving mountainous areas,” Shinsuke Koike says.
With an average age of 68 and sometimes without a successor, farmers are abandoning their rice paddies and fields. Today, there are only 1.3 million across the country, compared with 4 million in 1995. Each year, the forest and wild grass reclaim tens of thousands of hectares from the communities that had for centuries maintained these natural barriers at the foot of mountains, farmland and irrigation ponds — forming emblematic landscapes known in the country as “satoyama.”
“This accelerated decline reduces the frequency of human activities and their visibility in these buffer areas that once separated the bears’ territory from residential areas,” explains Yoshikazu Sato, a researcher at Rakuno Gakuen University and specialist in bear behavior.
– YouTube
Global warming disturbs hibernation
Without a clear boundary, bears now approach houses and gardens where fig and persimmon trees often grow and whose fragrant fruits they appreciate. They rummage through trash cans or venture into garages and kitchens to rip open bags of rice and sugar. “That’s where dangerous contact with humans can happen,” the researcher says.
There’s nothing left to do but run
“A bear is not naturally going to attack the people it encounters,” Moriyoshi Takayanagi explains. “But the slightest cry or sudden movement triggers its defense instinct. It feels threatened and switches to attack mode in a second.” The animal then stands on its hind legs and tries to hit its prey in the head and neck.
“There’s nothing left to do but run,” sneers the hunter, who has found himself hunted on numerous occasions.
Until the 2000s, these tragic encounters were rare. But global warming is pushing more and more bears to venture near homes. “We’re starting to understand how rising temperatures are disrupting plant phenology,” Sato explains. “It can affect the growth rate and production volumes of fruits and nuts that bears usually eat, in summer but also in the fall before they hibernate. This leads to a large fluctuation in available food from one year to the next.”
Last year, after another particularly long and hot summer, experts noted in the fall a sharp drop in the volumes of beechnuts, which are very high in calories and which bears love. In some areas, acorns and chestnuts are starting to run out, or fall very late, just as the bears try to fatten up before starting their winter rest. “They usually hibernate from December to April,” Moriyoshi Takayanagi notes. “But in some valleys, it’s no longer cold enough, so they stay awake and active much longer.”
In low mountain areas, where snow hardly falls anymore, some animals no longer hibernate at all and come down to the city, hungry.
Protection wolf robots
Communities across the country are implementing protection measures. In Akita, children wear a small bell attached to their school bags: the sound is supposed to dissuade bears that may be roaming the area to come closer. When there are election days in Gifu Prefecture, the municipality of Takayama organizes hunter patrols and distributes strings of firecrackers to polling stations that are located near the woods. Officials light them as soon as they are informed of the presence of an animal that could attack voters.
In Hokkaido, hikers, foresters or delivery men venturing onto isolated roads are advised to equip themselves with a powerful anti-bear spray. The device, which contains capsaicinoids extracted from chili peppers, neutralizes the animal by temporarily irritating its eyes and respiratory tract. The product is currently out of stock in the country.
Others are using technology. Rural villages are buying wolf-shaped howling robots from the Wolf Kamuy company. Pegged on the side of the road, the 600,000-yen (,806) machine, which looks like a large stuffed dog, screams and flashes its red eyes to keep wild animals away from living or cultivation areas.
Artificial intelligence to the rescue
Dipping into its savings, the municipality of Hanamaki, in Iwate Prefecture, has just invested in a network of 23 cameras connected to an artificial intelligence program. A software analyzes the images live and sends a warning as soon as it identifies a shape resembling a bear. A team of hunters is then mobilized.
We are only allowed to shoot 50 bullets per year
But professionals are increasingly rare and less and less motivated. Without a clear public policy, each municipality rolls out its own rewards for hunters who repel or kill animals that get near urban areas. Some, like Naie in Hokkaido, offer 10,300 yen () per day of patrol. Others, in Akita prefecture, now pay 5,000 yen () per animal killed.
“These amounts are ridiculous compared with the danger of the missions,” says hunter Moriyoshi Takayanagi.
Hunters could previously earn some money by selling bear meat or fat, in the form of balm. But this trade has become more complicated. Some also sold dried gall bladders to traffickers who trade them, for 0 each, in China, where people still believe in their medicinal properties. But this practice is now banned.
Despite the growing threat, the Japanese law governing gun ownership, which is already one of the most restrictive in the world, has also been tightened. “We are only allowed to shoot 50 bullets per year,” the hunter says ironically. It is also increasingly difficult to access rifles adapted to bear hunting.
Coexistence strategy
Defenders of bears say these strategies are a dead end, and advocate instead for a more educational approach. In Karuizawa, a posh tourist town northwest of Tokyo, the Picchio Wildlife Research Center has managed to make the cohabitation between bears and humans more relaxed. It first helped the city rethink its waste management by installing sturdy, airtight containers that are impossible for animals to open.
The research center then established a demarcation system that separates the bears’ territory from that of humans, and introduced surveillance of the animals living above the city. “Every night, we patrol to detect the movements of the bears, which we have equipped with collars carrying very high-frequency transmitters or with GPS chips,” says Amelia Hiorns, one of the center’s researchers.
The Karelian dogs bark to scare the bear as much as possible. This generally deters them from coming back near humans.
If a bear crosses the dividing line and gets too close to houses, the monitoring team sends one of its dog handlers to scare the animal with a Karelian Bear Dog, a Finnish breed. “We systematically carry out educational releases of the bears we have captured,” the expert explains. “This means that when we open the cages, we howl and the Karelian dogs bark to scare the bear as much as possible. This generally deters them from coming back near humans.”
Karuizawa hasn’t experienced a single bear attack for years, despite the fact that dozens of villas are scattered at high altitudes in the woods. “Our experience can be useful to other communities,” Amelia Hiorns says. “Instead of paying to kill more bears, we can choose this strategy of coexistence. But it requires a complete redistribution of resources, as well as a change of mentality.”
