Tell that to Hokkaido residents. The Japanese like their furry animals as much as anybody, but they’re out for blood following an increase in bear encounters, which often lead to maulings. Some farmers have taken to shooting the bears, which on Hokkaido is perfectly legal. While bears in Alaska or British Columbia are protected by rulebooks a few inches thick, Japan’s bear-management guide runs a few sentences, says bear biologist Yoshikazu Sato of Japan University in Tokyo. “If the bear eats or damages crops, the farmer is allowed to shoot it, no problem. And he doesn’t even have to shoot that same bear; he can shoot any one he sees.” Conservationists now worry that the open season on bears could put them on the list of endangered species.
These are rough times for the brown bear (Ursus arctos yesoensis). A cousin of the North American grizzly, it was once revered by Hokkaido’s native people, the Ainu, as a forest god. Tsutomi Mano, one of Hokkaido’s premier brown bear researchers, thinks that the local bears have gentler temperaments than other grizzlies, though some experts and most local people seem to disagree.
The problem is that on Hokkaido, more people and bears now live together in tighter quarters than anywhere else on earth. There are 5.6 million people and between 2,000 and 3,700 bears on an intensively farmed island about the size of Pennsylvania. In recent years the bear population has been falling due to rapid urban sprawl, which is putting bears and people on collision course. Some of the recent maulings occurred within 30 kilometers of Sapporo, making headlines in the city of 2 million.
About 250 kilometers outside Sapporo, in the heart of bear country, Sato slows his rusted pickup to point out where a brown bear climbed up and then collapsed a thin, wire deer fence. Sato has been using radio telemetry, DNA analyses for hair and scat, geographic information systems and good old-fashioned tracking to investigate the bear population surrounding the rural town of Urahoro, a prime meeting place for bears and humans because the town sits at the base of a mountain range.
The spate of close encounters has roots more than a century ago, when fishermen began depleting Hokkaido rivers of salmon, then a staple of the brown-bear diet. The bears became vegetarians, eating berries, wild mountain grapes, skunk cabbage and hogweed. From the 1950s to the 1970s loggers began cutting down the old-growth forests and lush underbrush that once gave bears an unusually good cover. “In Alaska you can sometimes see a grizzly up to one kilometer away,” says Mano. “In Hokkaido’s thick forest, however, a grizzly could be seated five meters away and you might not know it.”
Nowadays, the disappearance of these deep forests helps create the impression among locals that the bears are more numerous than they once were, when the opposite is true. Logging cleared space in the forests that allowed blackberry and raspberry bushes to thrive, which provided food for the bears, at least for a while. In recent years forest regeneration and tree farms have replaced berry patches, and the bears have been forced to look elsewhere for food, bringing them closer to towns and cities.
The exploding deer population has made things worse. A century ago Hokkaido’s deer were almost hunted to extinction, but strict protection policies, particularly in the past 40 years, helped the population rebound–and then some. Now the deer have no natural predators, and with winters growing increasingly mild, they’re reproducing like crazy–the population has grown from just a few thousand in the 1920s to 150,000 animals at present. The deer compete with the bears for the few remaining berry patches.
In a popularity contest, the deer would beat the bears hands down. But farmers revile both. They have taken to potting the deer, which feast on lettuce, cabbage and other crops. Alas, farmers leave the deer carcasses to rot in the fields, and the scent of death attracts more brown bears out from the mountains. While they’re snooping around the farm, they get wind of tasty cantaloupe and watermelon, which in Japan can go for $100 apiece.
The public is increasingly worried, but scientists insist the brown bears are misunderstood innocents. For a few years Sato and his crew of university volunteers had been tracking a bear nicknamed “Minmin,” before she eventually wandered onto an Urahoro farm and was shot almost immediately. “I was in Tokyo at the time when I got the call. It was too bad for Minmin, but she was a bad bear.” On Hokkaido, being bad means doing what bears do: looking for the next meal.
