Japan's bear attacks are breaking records and spilling into big cities

The bear was far from the wilderness when it crossed paths with a man in a parking lot and leapt on him.

Japan's latest bear attack injured four people last week and unfolded partly within view of a CCTV camera at a Fukushima steelworks.

It was a reminder of last year's record official national toll: 13 people killed and more than 220 injured as people encountered bears, including in city streets.

The creator of a national database mapping bear activity in Japan says this year could be even worse, after it showed an increase in encounters.

Kumamap recorded nearly 5,000 bear encounters between April and June, or 36 per cent more than the same months last year.

While the database sometimes counts the same incident more than once, its creator Danyel Koca said it pointed to a trend, and was backed up by official data suggesting sightings had increased and even doubled in parts of Japan.

Japan's Ministry of the Environment said more than 1,000 bear sightings were reported nationwide in January and March this year, nearly double the number for the same period last year, according to local media.

Why are bear encounters rising?

The bear at the Fukushima steelworks attacked three more people before it was chased into an electronics factory, where it reportedly climbed out a window and is still at large.

Across the country, four people have been killed by bears since April 1, when Japan's fiscal year begins, according to Japan's Ministry of the Environment.

Among the victims was a 73-year-old woman found dead near her home in north-eastern Japan last week.

Authorities were also investigating whether a bear had killed a person last month west of Tokyo, when only the bottom half of a body was discovered in the mountains near a backpack and trekking poles, according to local media reports.

That incident, which has not been added to the national death toll, occurred days after a Russian hiker was seriously injured by a bear in the same area.

Most encounters involve the Asian black bear on the islands of Honshu and Shikoku, and the Ussuri brown bear on the northern island of Hokkaido. Both are omnivorous species.

Experts say a shortage of nuts due to poor seasonal harvests has driven bears closer to cities in search of food, leading to the increase in sightings and attacks.

Yoshikazu Sato, a professor of wildlife ecology at Rakuno Gakuen University, told Japanese broadcaster NHK last month that bears were also being born and raised closer to human settlements.

"As a result, these young bears don't see people as a threat like the bears before them did," Professor Sato said.

"They're growing up without that fear and, as a result, they're less wary of humans."

Out of the wilderness

Now bears are wandering into cities.

This week, classes at 94 schools were suspended after one was seen for the first time in Utsonomiya, a city of 500,000 people about 100 kilometres north of Tokyo.

The bear was found on a private property and shot by a veterinarian with a tranquiliser gun on Tuesday, and nobody was injured, city official Ryuhei Irie told news agency Associated Press.

Naoki Ohnishi, from the Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute, told Nippon.com in November that bears would need culling.

"The rise in bear-related casualties is fundamentally the result of an increasing bear population," Dr Ohnishi said.

The Japanese government estimated the bear population at about 58,000 in March, according to Associated Press.

Officials have adopted a plan for managing bear populations, calling for systematic culling, tripling the number of municipal bear control staff and doubling the number of bear traps, it reported.

Even Japan's declining population is considered a reason for the increase in bear encounters, as the number of young people learning how to hunt and effectively cull the animals dwindles.

The problem is especially acute in the northern prefecture of Akita, which has less than 1 per cent of Japan's population but last year accounted for nearly a third of deaths from bear attacks.

It is located in the region of Tohoku in northern Honshu, which recorded a large portion of the nation's bear sightings.

The sightings became so frequent that Japan deployed its military Self-Defense Forces to help contain the problem.

But those efforts do not seem to have curbed bear encounters in Akita, which accounted for the largest increase in reports on Kumamap between April and June.

Mr Koca said the database recorded more than 1,500 encounters in the area, compared to 500 for the same months in 2025.

Official data from the prefecture, one of the sources used by Kumamap, similarly shows bear sightings reached more than 1,200 between April and June, up from 500 in the same period last year.

Mapping the danger

Despite local-level numbers, the national picture is less clear.

It prompted Mr Koca to fill the gap and create Kumamap as a source of national-level public data.

The database takes reports of bear incidents from various sources, including prefectural data, news reports and submissions made directly to the website, and maps them to give users a better sense of local bear activity.

It can help inform hikers, including tourists, whether they are at risk of encountering a bear on their route and translates Japanese reports into English.

The database sometimes counts the same incident twice when drawing information from multiple sources, but it removes duplicates where possible, Mr Koca said.

Even if it did not reflect the exact number of encounters, he said it helped give a picture of where bears had been active and could provide updates to people when nearby incidents were reported.

"I do know people who cancelled their hiking trips if there was a bear sighting in the vicinity of their destination," Mr Koca said.

Mr Koca would like to see more sources made public, such as reports of bear sightings and attacks made to police, for a clearer picture of bear behaviour.

"If they could get that data and let people know, people would carry bear spray, people would rethink their trips," he said.

"That would reduce the amount of interaction between the bears and the people, and that would save people and bears at the same time."