In the last
half of 2025, bear attacks upon villagers in the north-eastern regions of Japan
and the northern prefecture of Hokkaido had increased noticeably over the
already significant numbers of incidents (and injuries) reported in 2024. Seven
people died, and over 100 had been injured — including a Spanish tourist mauled
while waiting at a bus stop. News reports focused on the mayhem of a bear that
meandered into a supermarket and couldn’t find its way out, or the bloody signs
of a struggle and the missing villagers believed to have been dragged away by bears
eager to load up on calories before the start of their winter hibernation
cycle.
In
response, the Japanese government stepped in and oversaw the culling of
thousands of Japan’s Asian black bears and the larger brown bears that are
indigenous to the Hokkaido region. The bear is a sacred being for many traditional
Japanese villagers in the north, but even they are supportive of the government’s
effort to cut back the growing bear population.
Less frequently
reported is that these culls have for the past few years been racking up
thousands of wild bears killed in order to reduce the potential of harm
inflicted upon an increasingly aging population of people living in small towns
or villages in the mountainous north.
Environmentalists
have advanced a number of reasons for the rising incidents of bears hunting
humans, chief among which are demographic changes and global warming. As
younger Japanese leave their family villages and build new lives in urban
areas, farmlands that once served as a barrier between forests and residential
neighborhoods are going fallow. Meanwhile, global warming is negatively
affecting the growth of the beech nuts that provide forest bears their primary
source of calories.
The violent
reaction to the reports of bear attacks in Japan can be seen as evidence of an
ancient human emotion: fear.
While the
number of human/bear encounters is still statistically small in comparison to
the size of the nation as a whole and its population of 124 million, and the
media reportage may easily be understood as profit-enhancing hype, it cannot be
denied that the reaction is in some way an expression of what might be thought
of as a genetic memory.
Humans
are, after all, among the weakest creatures within the animal kingdom — this despite
our astonishing ability to decimate entire ecologies, drive species to
extinction, and send the entire planet into a death spiral. With neither fangs
nor claws, our species has always been easy prey for better-equipped predators:
lions and tigers and bears, oh my.
Some
researchers have even concluded that children hold a deep fear about “nature,”
and only a very few are eager to see the forest as a playground.
Ignore
that this idea of a “genetic memory” may be nonsense and that our fear of “the
wild” may be a hand-me-down from centuries of storytelling endorsed by parents
who wanted to keep their children alive. Ignore also the tendency to “soften”
apex predators by making them into stuffed animals and playtime toys. For every
Paddington or Tigger, there is an awareness that the “real thing” is a massive
grizzly or a man-eating tiger. As city dwellers we may not speak very much
about the actual animals, but quietly, subconsciously, we know what they are: stronger
than us.
The news
going around the world about bear attacks in Japan is a sign of our
understanding and fear of our relative powerlessness as animals. Perhaps the
first boogeyman our prehistoric ancestors knew was not a divine being, but a
hungry animal that could see very well in the dark. Too well for comfort.
I wonder
if the stuffed animal we embrace as children or the overfed cat asleep on the windowsill
our way of taming fear, of symbolically enacting power over our potential
killer?