FEATURE: Japan's 'government hunters' confront rising bear encounters

Yusuke Sakurai stopped dead in his tracks when he saw the black bear.It was the winter of his second year as a hunter, and the animal was slowly climbing a slope about 40 meters away in the mountains of Nagano Prefecture in central Japan. Sakurai says he could not even load his gun."All I could do was hold my breath and stay perfectly still," the 40-year-old recalled of his first bear encounter.Sakurai regularly comes face to face with bears as part of his job as a "government hunter" -- a civil servant with a hunting license tasked with responding to wildlife threats. Based at the city of …READ FULL ARTICLE