Midmorning on August 14, police in Japan’s Hokkaido Prefecture received an emergency phone call from a distressed hiker. The caller had been hiking on Mount Rausu with a young man, who was ahead of the caller on the trail. The young man rounded a blind curve, and his friend heard him call out for help.
The hiker had walked right into the path of a brown bear. The bear attacked, and while the young man tried to fight back, he was quickly dragged off the narrow trail into the forest.
Authorities have now recovered his body. The young man, a 26-year-old Tokyo resident, had been dragged several hundred meters away, then killed. Bloody clothing and personal items lay around the scene.
They also identified the well-known bear responsible for the attack, highlighting the danger of wild animals becoming too comfortable with people.
An Ussuri brown bear, the slightly smaller cousin of the grizzly bear. Photo: Sahoro Bear Mountain Research Center
Killer bear was well-known in the area
Authorities shot an adult bear and two cubs who were near the body when they reached the scene. DNA testing has now confirmed that the bear they shot was responsible for the fatal attack. Nicknamed Iwaobetsu’s Mom and given the formal identification code SH, she was well known in the area and did not appear to be afraid of humans.
SH was likely also behind several incidents in the lead-up to the attack. Only four days earlier, she and her cubs had approached a hiker, who had to threaten her with bear spray. Two days before the attack, she chased another hiker and didn’t stop even after he sprayed her with deterrent.
Though the mother bear weighed 140kg, locals didn’t consider her dangerous. A frequent visitor, Takumi Nakashima, told Japanese news outlet Mainichi Shimbun that according to conventional wisdom, the brown bear population was well fed and had no reason to attack people. Now he thinks that people, himself included, “had become numb to the distance we should keep from wild animals.”
A mother and cubs on the road in Hokkaido. Photo: Kazuyoshi Sako
An alarming rise in attacks
Japan has seen bear attacks rise alarmingly in recent years. A surging brown bear population, coupled with habitat loss and decreasing food sources, has emboldened animals to come into close contact with people. Even Sapporo, the fifth-largest city in Japan, has had an urban brown bear population for over a decade now.
There are over 10,000 brown bears in Hokkaido. However, now that hunting restrictions have eased, the number is beginning to decrease again after decades of growth. But that still leaves many bears which, fed by tourists and encroached upon by expanding urban areas, are no longer wary of humans. And conservationists worry that mass culling could easily go too far.
The island of Hokkaido is also Japan’s only brown bear habitat. The mainland only has the smaller Asian Black Bears.
The hiking trails on Mount Rausu have reopened, but the local government urges visitors to carry bear spray, travel in the daylight, and never hike alone.
