Why Have There Been So Many Bear Attacks in Japan in 2025 and 2026?

Written by

John P. Rafferty

Fact-checked by

Britannica Editors

History

Japan is one of the world’s most advanced countries. You can see it in the country’s modern architecture (which is built to resist earthquake damage and tsunamis) and the Shinkansen, its high-speed passenger rail system (which connects residents of the islands of Honshu, Kyushu, and Hokkaido). Japan in the 2020s has a booming electronics industry and one of the world’s lowest rates of gun-related homicides (fewer than 10 people annually). But few people know that, consistently, it is ranked highest in the world for bear attacks.

Japan holds the title

One would expect that places such as Russia, Canada, or the United States—with large, uninhabited areas of bear country—would have more. The reality is that Japan has had problems with bears for quite a while. The country hosts two species that live primarily in remote mountain and forest habitats: the Ussuri brown bear (Ursus arctos lasiotus), which lives on Japan’s northernmost main island of Hokkaido, and the Japanese black bear (U. thibetanus japonicus), which lives on Honshu and Shikoku. Officials at Japan’s Environment Ministry have reported 50 or more people injured by bears annually since 2014. This figure rose to 213 in 2023, and approximately 238 people were injured in 2025 according to Japan’s environment ministry, with 13 of these attacks turning deadly. Bear attacks continued across northern Japan in 2026, with 23 attacks resulting in 3 deaths by early June. In comparison, there are often fewer than 50 bear attacks across the whole of North America each year, which result in about 2–5 deaths annually.

Causes and complications

Japanese black bear (Ursus thibetanus japonicus) — Japanese black bear (*Ursus thibetanus japonicus*)Japanese black bears (*Ursus thibetanus japonicus*) are hunted for food as well as for their gallbladder, paws, and other body parts.

Japan’s bear issue appears to be climate-driven. Ussuri brown bears and Japanese black bears feed primarily on acorns, beech nuts, and berries, and they also feed on the carcasses of boar and deer. Over the past several decades, as the climate has warmed, food has been plentiful, which has helped to drive up combined bear numbers from 15,000 individuals in 2012 to an estimated 54,000 in 2025, which rose to an estimated 58,000 by early 2026, according to Japanese government statistics (see also global warming). Some wildlife officials note that since nut and berry production was low in 2025, the increased competition for food has forced some bears out of the forests and mountains into farmlands and residential areas (including shopping malls).

This situation is further complicated by how Japan manages its bear population: Bear hunting with firearms is limited to licensed hunters exclusively and then only under special conditions; otherwise, authorities can revoke a hunter’s license. In addition, up until November 2025, the law required that neither the police nor the military could use firearms to shoot bears and that they could only assist hunters in the setting of traps. These strict legal limitations—combined with the fact that the bear hunters themselves are aging (Japan’s median age in 2024 was 47.2 years, and the country has the highest proportion of people older than 65 in the world)—have greatly reduced the number of hunters available, which has substantially depressed overall hunting pressure on the bears. There were nearly 518,000 licensed hunters in 1975; that number had fallen to fewer than 218,500 by 2020, with more than half being older than 60.

Bear attacks have mostly occurred in rural communities with declining human populations. In these farming hamlets and villages, many younger people have left to take jobs in the cities. These areas remain in the care of older generations, but the vegetation has been left to grow a bit wilder than usual, since there are fewer people around to cut it back. The overgrown shrubs and grasses give the bears cover as they raid crops and look for other sources of food.

To its credit, Japan has responded by raising awareness in bear-prone areas, such as in Akita prefecture, where bear sightings spiked in 2025. Government and wildlife officials have recommended that residents raise electric fencing and other barriers and reduce the amount of food lying about in gardens, orchards, and garbage containers. The government is seeking to hire more staff to help hunters with bear monitoring and trap-setting efforts and is applying high-tech solutions (such as drones that amplify dog barks over their speakers to drive bears away). But some wildlife officials argue that the government should do more on the management side of the equation, including creating incentives to attract younger hunters to the work of bear population management.

By 2026 the country still had a long way to go to mitigate the ongoing bear threat, yet Japanese authorities had made some significant steps forward. Early in the year, government officials introduced legislation that pressed for culling of 10,000 bears from the population by the end of the year and called for relaxing firearm rules to allow culling outside of designated hunting areas. In addition, Japan’s Environmental Ministry began the process of increasing their current bear-management staffing from about 780 to 2,500 while also doubling the number of bear traps in the field from roughly 5,500 to 10,000. As staffing ramps up and new, licensed hunters begin to be deployed in bear prone areas, local governments are working with businesses to leverage technology, including drones, additional hiking trail cameras, and artificial intelligence to track and identify individual bears that could become threats to towns and villages.

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