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Authorities in Japan are searching for a hunter who went missing on a mountain in Hokkaido near where a brown bear was recently spotted, amid a spate of deadly attacks by the animals that has triggered the declaration of a bear emergency in one town.
The hunter was reported missing by a friend on Mt Esan on Tuesday afternoon in the northern island of Hokkaido after he failed to return home. A rifle believed to belong to the missing man was found on the side of a mountain road, and bloodstains were discovered nearby. A large brown bear was seen near the road on Saturday.
Also on Saturday, a newspaper delivery man was fatally mauled in the town of Fukushima, about 120km away.
Kenju Sato, 52, was repeatedly bitten by a bear and dragged about 100 metres into bushes, where his body was found a few hours later. Neighbours who heard his cries attempted unsuccessfully to scare the creature off.
Local authorities declared a month-long brown bear emergency for the town, the first of its kind to be issued, with police, fire fighters and hunters running patrols 24 hours a day. The bear in Fukushima was reported to be about 1.5 metres in length, smaller than the one spotted around Mt. Esan.
Multiple bear attacks have also been reported in Japan’s main island of Honshu this month.
An 81-year-old woman was killed on 4 July by a black bear in Iwate prefecture in northeast Japan while two elderly women were attacked in separate incidents on Tuesday morning, one in the northern Aomori prefecture and the other near the ancient capital of Nara, hundreds of kilometres to the south.
Experts have attributed the rise in attacks in recent years to a scarcity of acorns and other staples of the ursine diet – a problem some experts have attributed to the climate crisis. They have also been encouraged to travel further afield by depopulation in rural communities and the resulting increase in abandoned farmland.
After a record 219 injuries and fatalities in the previous fiscal year, serious incidents fell sharply in the year to March 2025, possibly due to food being more plentiful than in previous years.
However, a recent report by Tohoku’s regional forest office, which covers five northern prefectures, has predicted an extremely poor harvest of beechnuts, a staple bear food, this autumn, raising fears that hunger will drive more of the animals into residential areas in search of nourishment.
Authorities are urging residents in the region not to dispose of food waste outside their homes to avoid attracting the creatures.
Hokkaido’s Ussuri brown bears can grow up to 3 metres and exceed 500kg. The Asiatic black bears found elsewhere in Japan are rarely larger than 1.5 metres and 150kg but can still kill humans.
In response to the increasing numbers of bear encounters in residential areas, the government in April relaxed its strict hunting laws to allow bears to be shot in urban areas, allowing municipalities to authorise “emergency shootings” if there is a threat to human life.
