Here in Big Sky we have our moments with bears. Just this year, officials police-taped the Uplands Trail after a sighting. A few years ago, a grizzly tragically mauled a biker near Fish Camp off Ousel Falls Road.
But we’ve got it easy compared to Japan. Look at what’s happening there. Bears have been roaming supermarkets, shopping centers and wandering into hot spring resorts. All too often, they eat someone.
Bear attacks aren’t new to Japan. In 1915, in the country’s deadliest attack, a 750-pound brown bear terrorized a small farming village for six days. It killed seven, including a pregnant woman. Hunters tracked down the killer and shot it dead. More recently, in 2016, a group of bears stalked a group of elderly bamboo pickers. Hunters again came to the rescue, but not before the animals killed and ate four of the seniors.
In the last few years, there has been a spike in attacks. Blame climate change. Because of warmer temperatures, bears can’t find enough wild acorns and beechnuts to satisfy them. Driven by hunger, they have come into towns and ambushed the locals. There have been sightings within 25 miles of Tokyo. Last year, bears killed 13 in Japan compared to only three in the United States. There have been more deaths this year. In May, a 69-year-old woman went missing after hiking into the forest to forage. A search team later found her lifeless body near her car. Her face and head were gashed by what could only be a bear. Authorities organized a hunting patrol to find the beast but came up empty. The killer bear remains at large.
A lack of bear awareness is partly to blame for the deaths. We have signs on every trail saying things like “This is BEAR COUNTRY!” We tell people to carry bear spray, to be careful with their food and to calmly back away if they see a bear. Until recently, Japan did none of this.
But a bigger factor is the bears themselves. Like in America, Japan has a brown bear and a black bear. The Japanese brown bear is found only on the northern island of Hokkaido. It is territorial and, like our grizzly, will fight if it feels challenged. The more prevalent black bears are the bigger problem. While our black bears are timid and run away when humans are around, their Japanese cousins are as mean as our grizzlies and are responsible for most of the casualties. Found only on the main island of Honshu, the bears will stand their ground and attack.
The Japanese black bear is made of fiercer stuff than our black bears because they grew up in a tougher neighborhood. Millions of years ago in the Pleistocene era, American black bears shared their range with a fearsome predator, the sabertoothed tiger. Fortunately for the bears, the sabertoothed tiger couldn’t climb trees. Our black bears didn’t have to fight. They could save themselves by jumping up a maple or a spruce. They retained the flight instinct to the present day. The Japanese black bears, on the other hand, shared the forest with something akin to a Siberian tiger, the dreaded Amur tiger. The Amur tiger could climb. If a bear hoisted itself aloft, the Amur followed. That left Japanese black bears with no choice but to stand and fight.
To get the bear situation under control, alarmed officials have relaxed the rules about hunting in urban areas and are recruiting bear specialists to the forest service. In tourist spots, they have deployed drones that blast frightful barking sounds designed to scare off the bears. On the surveillance front, they have installed thermal cameras. Homeowners and farmers have put up electric fences. Seven-11 and Lawson’s, two of Japan’s ubiquitous convenience store chains, have switched from automatic to manual doors to keep bears from letting themselves in. Tour operators have armed visitors with bear spray. The military is also involved. It provides expertise, logistical support and money to cull the bear population. There are 50,000 black bears and 13,000 brown bears in Japan. The government aims to lop a few thousand out those numbers by 2030.
Conservation groups are appalled. The argue that killing isn’t the solution. They advocate planting beech and oak trees deep in the mountains to restore habitats and lure bears away from populated areas. Better trash management, they say, would also help. Others argue that only identified killers be eliminated.
Maybe Montana should send a few experts over to help. It might save some bears.
Greg Steinmetz
Big Sky, Montana
