A dramatic bear hunt in a midsize Japanese city could be a harbinger of what is to come

It was early June and a bear was running rampant in the Tochigi Prefectural capital, throwing the city of 500,000 into a state of paralysis.

Schools were closed, residents were frantically checking their gardens for any signs of the animal and specialists from the local zoo were deployed to bring the bear under control.

The three-day chase ended when a zookeeper shot the bear with a tranquilizer gun near a private residence.

The dramatic episode, which was widely shown on TV and the internet, was the latest in a growing number of conflicts between humans and bears in Japan.

Following last fiscal year’s record-breaking number of bear-related incidents — nationwide, 238 people were attacked and 13 were killed — Japan is bracing for another pre-hibernation surge in sightings, encounters and attacks this fall. So far, experts say the relatively rich acorn harvests this year would keep many bears sufficiently fed, likely preventing the recurrence of horrors played out across the Tohoku and Kanto regions last autumn.

But in the medium to long term, Japan’s challenges will continue, with incidents like the one in Utsunomiya being only a harbinger of what could happen in other communities.

Nationwide countermeasures

Last November, the central government compiled an emergency bear attack prevention plan aimed at actively reducing the number of bears in the country and increasing staff and resources for bear management and culling, including through the wider adoption of “government hunters.”

In March, the government followed up with a roadmap outlining steps to take by 2030, such as tripling the number of municipal officials in charge of capturing bears to 2,500 and doubling the number of bear traps to 10,000 across the nation.

A male bear that wandered into Utsunomiya, Tochigi Prefecture, in June is seen on a path after being shot with a tranquilizer gun. | COURTESY OF TOCHIGI PREFECTURAL GOVERNMENT

The government also set region-specific goals for the number of bears to cull, based on the assessment that the number of Asian black bears — long the target of conservation efforts and still classified as a vulnerable species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature — had become overpopulated in the Tohoku, Kanto and Chubu regions.

It aims to reduce the bear population in Tohoku, Kanto and Chubu to 62%, 67% and 63% of the current level, respectively, by fiscal 2030. In Hokkaido, home to an estimated 11,600 brown bears, the government aims to reduce the population of that species to 8,200 in fiscal 2030.

The government is planning a less drastic reduction in the number of bears in the Kinki and Chugoku regions, culling just enough — about 900 bears — to keep the current population level.

Under a new emergency culling system instituted last year, hunters can now shoot bears in residential areas with permission from local authorities. Guns have been fired 36 times under the system as of Oct. 12.

Evidence-based approach

But culling alone won’t solve longstanding problems.

Mayumi Yokoyama, professor of wildlife management at the University of Hyogo and a member of an expert panel on bear management measures under the Environment Ministry, advocates for a long-term, evidence-based approach. She says that while the series of new measures taken by the government is welcome, it will take years to nurture specialists and accumulate data.

Yokoyama has long called for wildlife management that takes into account the nation’s aging population and decline, saying not just bears but deer, boars and monkeys have grown rapidly and expanded their habitats in abandoned or less-monitored farm fields, intensifying crop damage.

In response to a request from the Environment Ministry, the Science Council of Japan in 2019 put together a list of proposals, calling for scientific monitoring of wildlife populations, community-based solutions for abandoned farmlands, utilization of wild meat and nurturing of wildlife management experts. But government efforts fizzled out soon after that, she recalls.

“This time, related ministries all responded and set aside budgets for various measures, which is a very big move,” she said. “But on the ground, the lack of data and specialists persists. They cannot be improved overnight.”

Municipal governments are now competing to hire the limited number of wildlife management specialists in the country, she said, noting that Japan needs to educate more of them so young researchers can envision a long-term career in this field.

Another major issue is that, because of the lack of data and human resources for continued monitoring in many prefectures, there’s no precise count of how many bears there are in the nation. In June, for example, the Niigata Prefectural Government announced it raised the estimated median number of bears in the prefecture from around 1,400 to 8,747 — a sixfold increase. As a result, local experts warned that the possibility of bears roaming Niigata cities could not be ruled out.

Some prefectures have done better than others. In Hyogo Prefecture, officials and researchers, including Yokoyama, have monitored the bear population for over 25 years.

In the late 1990s, Hyogo officials started a new program that involved capturing bears that ventured too close to human settlements, “punishing” them with bear spray and other methods, and releasing them back into the wild.

The released bears were tagged with microchips so researchers could track their behavior. The prefecture now has a database of some 3,000 microchipped bears, which it uses to estimate the bear population.

The prefecture decided to start culling if the number of bears exceeded 800.

The officials confirmed that the number hit the threshold in 2016 and that the bear population had grown at a rate of 15% a year. This prompted Hyogo to move from conservation to culling.

Furthermore, when the bears are culled, they are dissected so the officials can collect biological data such as age and nutritional condition. Over 700 bears have been analyzed this way in the prefecture, according to Yokoyama.

Urban bears

Meanwhile, bear management is being complicated by urban bears, or those who have become accustomed to human populations and frequently roam into residential neighborhoods to search for food.

Kazuhiko Maita, a former official at Akita Prefectural Government who now heads the Institute for Asian Black Bears, points to a possible surge in urban bears next year due to increased acorn production.

“When acorn production follows its natural cycle and the crop is abundant, more cubs are born,” he says. “Then the following year, if there’s a poor crop, mother bears with their cubs come down into human-inhabited areas.

“When the mothers are culled, their cubs, which are only about 50 centimeters long, are left behind. Having had no experience with life in the wild, these young bears remain in human settlements and gradually become what we call urban bears.”

As this process repeats over time, we may see more cases of exceptionally large bears emerge in urban areas next April, Maita says.

While Utsunomiya grabbed many of the headlines, this spring also saw post-hibernation bears turning up in the cities of Akita, Sendai and Koriyama, Fukushima Prefecture.

Impact of climate change

A lot remains unknown about the effects of a warming planet on recent rises in Japan of bear sightings and attacks, both Yokoyama and Maita say.

Researchers at the Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute wrote in a 2019 paper that rising temperatures over the past 40 years may have disrupted this harvest cycle of acorns and shortened it to two years instead of three to four years previously.

Yokoyama says that bears in the Shiretoko Peninsula of Hokkaido, which have a salmon-heavy diet, may be affected by rising ocean temperatures and the resulting fall in salmon traveling upstream.

“But we have very little data to substantiate the effects of climate change; we don’t even know how many bears exist to begin with,” Yokoyama says.

The male bear in June that turned up in Utsunomiya was probably not out hunting for food, Maita says. It ventured into the city during the mating season, when male bears fight fiercely for female bears. Bears that lose are often driven out of the mountains and travel long distances to areas with few competitors, he says.

After a three-day hunt, it was zookeeper Tetsuo Iso who put an end to the saga.

As the drama unfolded, Iso, a 65-year-old worker at Utsunomiya Zoo, was asked by the prefectural government to help capture the bear. Because the bear traveled widely across town, often disappearing into bushes around homes, the first challenge for him and other officials was simply to locate it.

Tetsuo Iso, a worker at Utsunomiya Zoo in Tochigi Prefecture, recalls that June’s bear chase in downtown areas of the city involved several unique challenges. | TOMOKO OTAKE

When Iso, the zookeeper, finally came face to face with the bear on June 9, two days after being mobilized by the city, the animal seemed resigned to its fate, he says.

The bear was cornered into the narrow bushy area of a residential property, surrounded by a condominium, a parking lot, a 1.8-meter-high sheet metal fence and a garden shed. Visibility was poor.

“Police officials asked me if I could hit the bear if it bolted out of a bush,” he recalled during a recent interview at the zoo on the outskirts of Utsunomiya, describing the mission as highly dangerous and potentially life-threatening.

“I said I would pull the trigger, but I couldn’t guarantee I would hit the bear,” he said.

The media circus around the incident only added pressure to Iso’s big moment.

“There were all kinds of onlookers and YouTubers, and media helicopters buzzing overhead.”

Iso looked for a position from where he could aim the tranquilizer gun safely. He fired two shots, but both missed and hit the ground.

Finally, he moved around to the parking lot behind the house and used his gun to create a small space between the fence’s metal sheets. He saw the bear’s head and the white crescent mark on its chest, and fired toward the chest from about a meter away, striking the bear and ending the chase.

“When I aimed my gun, he looked at me but didn’t growl,” Iso says, noting he routinely uses tranquilizer guns at the zoo when treating sick animals. “I know that look, when he accepted his fate, because animals in the zoos sometimes show that same expression when they know their end is near.

The bear was later killed by authorities in line with prefectural policy. Once bears get an appetite for human food, they are likely to venture into human settlements again.

“I felt sorry for it. He was terrified for days — and killed in the end,” Iso said.

Regardless of the reason that bear turned up in Utsunomiya, he won’t be the last.

Bears in Tochigi, which had long lived almost exclusively in the lush forests in northeastern areas such as Nikko and Nasu, have gradually expanded their habitats westward over the years, according to Tetsuya Maruyama, leader of wildlife damage control group at the Tochigi Prefectural Government.

This time, the officials were able to capture the bear without harming anybody. The fact that the city of Utsunomiya had compiled an emergency bear culling manual with a detailed flow chart in March helped, he says. But the incident has highlighted the need for local authorities to step up their preparedness.

“We realized that we should have more shields and bear sprays ready, and improve coordination between police, the prefecture and local municipalities,” he says. “There are municipalities in the prefecture that still don’t have emergency manuals made. They should create them soon to better prepare for contingencies.”