Issue:
December 2025 | Letter from Hokkaido
Hokkaido’s response to the recent string of encounters has been predictably unimaginative
To borrow an often used comparison, if a group of Martians had landed in Japan last month and seen the local media, they could be forgiven for concluding that the two things that most worry Japanese people are encounters with the increasing number of non-Japanese human residents (and visitors) or those with their ursine equivalents.
The government has announced new policies for both sets of concerns. While even Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s most fervent supporters would, hopefully, agree that setting steel traps and calling in police officers to deal with foreigners would be going too far, that is the fate awaiting Japan’s bears, especially in Hokkaido.
It wasn’t that long ago that Hokkaido’s brown bears were something exotic in the minds of visitors, and even urban residents in places such as Sapporo, who mostly saw them at the zoo. In the early 1990s, an estimated 5,000 bears were living in the wild in the prefecture – enough to be slightly concerned about if you were hiking in the mountains, but not enough to become paranoid over.
But Hokkaido’s population has aged and declined, resulting in fewer licensed hunters to protect crops from bears. Climate change is wreaking havoc on the animals’ traditional hunting grounds, especially the salmon runs in the more remote streams and rivers. Hokkaido’s brown bear population slowly expanded, and by 2009 there were estimated 10,000.
As of early 2024, the estimate stood at about 11,600, with the number expected to rise over the next decade. As food becomes more difficult to forage, the number of bear sightings is also bound to increase. While tragic deaths due to bear attacks, including a hiker in the Shiretoko mountain range who was killed in August, are still rare, Hokkaido police announced earlier this month that in Sapporo alone they had received 319 reports of bear sightings between April and October – a vast increase on the same period last year.
Facing pressure to act, Hokkaido Governor Naomichi Suzuki followed Akita Prefecture’s lead and announced plans to change laws, rules, and regulations to make it easier for local governments to empower licensed civilian hunters to respond to requests to track and kill bears, and to make the same request of police officers and Ground Self-Defense Forces.
Suzuki wants to call on the services of the G-SDF’s Northern Army, which has a reported 16,000 troops based in Hokkaido. When it's not helping Sapporo put together the annual February Snow Festival, the Northern Army is tasked with guarding the northern part of Japan from the large and unpredictable “bear” to the west.
Their possible involvement raises sensitive legal and political issues about how the SDF is deployed. It also creates logistical problems. How, exactly, would SDF soldiers respond when a panicked local town or village calls and says it needs help tracking down a bear, or bears?
Would SDF forces in Hokkaido carry rifles into the woods or within city limits, along with local hunters’ groups and armed police officers or former police officers who still have hunting licenses? Who is in charge if something goes wrong? Who tracks a bear, lays a trap, kills and then disposes of it?
These are all questions that will have to be addressed, but Suzuki wants to push forward. “In Hokkaido, a response involving the Self-Defense Forces is something we haven't really dealt with before,” he said in October. “How, exactly, we would proceed with such a response is not yet finalized. But Hokkaido faces the threat of brown bears. We must anticipate situations where we might need to request the Self-Defense Forces' cooperation.”
Suzuki is being rushed into acting by sensationalist media reports of bear attacks and questionable sightings, leading people to call in reports of bears in places where there were none, or where the animal spotted was a fox, a deer, or something else.
But what is dangerous – to both bears and humans – is that Japan’s bear policy is being crafted with undue haste in response to growing public fear, panic, and paranoia. Yet the bear “problem” is hardly new. Especially in Hokkaido.
With the exception of environmentalists and NGOs fighting to prevent the mass slaughter of bears, one detects little sympathy in the halls of Suzuki’s prefectural offices or the Prime Minister's Office for policies that call on humans to compromise, possibly in the form of tough new laws that protect bear sanctuaries or relocate them rather than killing them when they are caught.
Instead, there are those who advocate ramping up efforts to go after brown bears (over 1,000 were hunted in 2024 and that’s down from 1,800 in 2023). They have called for a cull and for incarcerating a select number of bears in cages. Other ideas include the introduction of “bear safaris”, allowing them to be monitored while visitors pay to stare at them like animals in a zoo or sea park.
There is precious little discussion, though, of how the bear “threat” could be contained other than by increasing the number of people carrying arms, sometimes in crowded urban areas.
After Hokkaido’s brown bears go into hibernation this month, the debate over how to contain them is likely to hibernate too. But once spring comes and they wake up hungry, there will again be a spike in the number of sightings and attacks, followed by another cycle of warnings about the danger they pose to humans. I suspect, though, that the debate won’t touch on the dangers we pose to our furry neighbours.
Eric Johnston is the Senior National Correspondent for the Japan Times. The views expressed within are his own and do not represent those of the Japan Times.
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