TOKYO - As Japan's rural communities hollow out and its forests reclaim abandoned farmland, bears have moved in -- and moved closer to people. As a result, a record 238 people were attacked in fiscal 2025, 13 of them fatally.
The trend has forced a fundamental shift in government policy from protecting bears to actively reducing the wildlife population that has, as one expert put it, "just happened to make Japan's serious problem visible."
Experts warn that society's structural problems of depopulation and shortage of manpower to manage farmland, especially in rural areas, should be addressed from a larger perspective, rather than dealing with a bear issue in isolation, as they have eroded the buffer zones necessary for people and wildlife to avoid encounters.
As part of its wildlife population management measures, the government designated bears as a target species for control in 2024, set tentative regional culling targets for fiscal 2026 and population reduction goals for fiscal 2030.
Under a road map compiled in March, it targets to trim the number of bears in the northeastern region of Tohoku, where the population and attacks are concentrated, tentatively to 12,000 by 2030 from the currently estimated 19,237. The target for Chubu in central Japan is 11,000 and for Kanto, centering on Tokyo, is 2,000.
It also launched a nationwide standardized bear census in June, beginning in Tohoku, and introduced zoning guidelines to help local governments separate bears from human settlements.
"Obtaining reliable estimates of the number of individuals is vital to population management, especially for evaluating the effectiveness of our programs," said Shinjiro Sasaki, director of the Environment Ministry's Wildlife Protection and Management Office.
Previously, the bear population in the country -- black bears on the main island of Honshu, together with a tiny population on Shikoku, and brown bears in Hokkaido -- was estimated by a tally of figures reported by each prefecture, each of which conducts surveys using its own methods and schedules, according to the ministry.
As the number has generally recovered since the 1990s due to protection measures, "It is also important for us to plan how many animals we should capture per year, or what kind of individuals we should catch and where," Sasaki said.
The ministry plans to set up more than 800 cameras in six prefectures in the Tohoku region including Akita and Iwate where many attacks on humans have been reported, as well as adjacent Niigata Prefecture, on the Sea of Japan coast, to estimate the number of black bears.
It employed a unique approach combining photographs of bears lured with bait and a relative abundance index based on images of animals moving naturally through the landscape, Sasaki said.
By setting cameras and baits at the height of around 1.5 meters from the ground, the ministry aims to capture images of bears standing on their hind legs and identify individuals by their distinctive crescent-shaped white chest markings.
The ministry is expected to analyze the captured images and release its report on the population estimate by the end of the current fiscal year through March 2027.
The recent attacks, however, are not just a bear problem but rather a result of deeper structural issues the country faces, said Shinsuke Koike, a professor at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology.
Depopulation and aging of rural communities as well as a shift in people's main energy source to fossil fuels from wood have allowed forests to recover and sustain higher populations of large animals like bears, he said, calling for a broader approach involving many stakeholders to address the matters.
Japan's forests increased about 40 percent in terms of the volume of trees in the 51-year span from 1966 to 2017, according to the ministry. In contrast, human activities in hilly and mountainous areas have declined.
Koji Yamazaki, director of the Ibaraki Nature Museum, said he believes the crisis stems from bears losing their wariness of humans, while also noting a change of the mammal's behavior from the past.
Usually, bears attack humans based on a defense mechanism and tend to regard the victims as food after death, but in recent cases like those in Akita and Iwate prefectures, they started eating the victims right after the attacks, according to Yamazaki.
"We need to thoroughly study characteristics of bears that attacked and fed on humans -- whether they were male or female, old or young, as well as their nutritional and health conditions -- to find the answer," he said.
Authorities need to keep the animals away from living space of people anyway as the recent tragedies are the results of increased activities of bears around humans, Yamazaki added.
Under the zoning guidelines, local governments are expected to divide land into four areas -- exclusion area, intensified control area, buffer zone and core habitat -- to deal with problematic individuals and control the population.
Authorities can kill animals that negatively influence human livelihoods in any of those four areas, while they are not allowed to kill bears with no such behavior in core habitat even for the purpose of population control.
The central government aims that all local governments formulate zoning management plans by fiscal 2030, and establish greater separation between human settlements and bear habitat in fiscal 2031 and beyond, according to the road map.
"To realize the separation, we need to remove elements attracting bears from the surroundings of living space," including abandoned farmland, Yamazaki said.
In consideration of the shortage of manpower to manage farmland in rural Japan like Tohoku, Koike said, "It is inevitable now to design land and infrastructure in accordance with projected (falls in human) population, especially in rural areas."
"Maybe we are at a crossroads where we must choose which areas remain habitable to pour in resources and support," he said.
