Bear Injuries Hit a Record 216 in Japan — Depopulation Has Emptied the Hands That Tended the Boundary

Bears coming into where people live and injuring them have hit a record. By the Environment Ministry's preliminary figures, bear-inflicted injuries in FY2025 (April 2025 to March 2026) reached 216 cases, 238 people injured, and 13 deaths[1], the most since records began in FY2006. It surpassed FY2023's 198[2], until now the record, in both cases and deaths. Sightings, too, reached 50,801, 2.1 times FY2023[3], and permitted captures 14,741[4], both records.

The injuries cluster in October

The annual total alone hides the shape of what happened. Broken out by month, the injuries bunch into three autumn months. From April through August they run between nine and 17 a month; September brings 37, and October 78[5]. November falls to 32, December to five. The three months from September to November account for 147 of the year's 216 injuries — 68%.

The deaths follow the same shape. Of the 13, seven fell in October[5], with one in June, three in July, one in August, and one in November.

Akita and Iwate account for nearly half

The concentration by place is greater still. By prefecture, Akita recorded 59 injuries (67 people hurt, four deaths) and Iwate 39 (40 hurt, five deaths)[5] — those two prefectures alone make 98 injuries, 45% of the national total. Fukushima follows with 21, Niigata 16, Yamagata 12, Nagano 11: a tilt toward the Tohoku and Hokushinetsu regions.

The 13 deaths sit in the same places: five in Iwate, four in Akita, two in Hokkaido, one in Miyagi, one in Nagano. This is not something happening evenly across the country, but gathering in particular regions in a particular season.

It is not a steady climb

It is not, however, a steady climb. Injuries in FY2024 fell to 82[6]. It is a spike pattern, leaping in particular years, and the ministry cites a poor crop of beech and oak nuts as the trigger. In a year when the nuts fail, bears come down to the settlements in search of food.

Where injuries happen moves with the season

But the place to look is where the injuries happen. The site of bear injuries shifts, over the seasons, from forest to where people live. In spring it is almost all forest, but in the ministry's seasonal breakdown of injury sites (FY2023), by December, urban areas make up 67%[7]. Bears are entering the human sphere.

The satoyama buffer has gone

Why do bears come down to where people live? A poor nut crop is only the trigger. What has changed is the side that receives them. Between where people lived and where bears ranged, there was once a buffer, the satoyama. By gathering firewood, cutting undergrowth, and tilling fields, people kept a tended band between forest and settlement. The hands that did that tending thinned out with depopulation and aging.

Abandoned farmland changed in quality, not quantity

The numbers show this change in quality, not quantity. The total area of abandoned farmland has, if anything, edged down, from 284,000 hectares in 2008 to 257,000[8]. It is not the simple story of abandonment forever spreading. But within the total, farmland that can still be brought back into use fell from 149,000 to 98,000 hectares, while land hard to reclaim and effectively returned to forest rose from 135,000 to 159,000[9]. The satoyama and fields that once worked as a buffer are returning, untended, to thicket and wood, becoming a path for bears. The boundary itself is dissolving from within.

The hands that keep the boundary are thinning too

The hands that keep the boundary are thinning too. The hunters who catch bears are aging, and securing people to manage wildlife has become a challenge, notes a ministry report on who manages wildlife. The fewer the people who manage the boundary, the less it holds. The same depopulation is blurring the cadastral boundaries of inherited forest land, too (Inherited Forest Land Without Clear Boundaries（このサイトの記事）). Whether it runs between people and the wild or between one owner's land and the next, a boundary blurs once the hands that keep it are gone.

Captures also hit a record, at 14,741

The figure on the responding side jumped in the same year. Bears taken under permit came to 14,741 in FY2025[10] — 1.6 times the previous high of 9,271 in FY2023. The split is 12,602 Asiatic black bears and 2,139 brown bears.

By prefecture, Akita led with 2,691[10], followed by Hokkaido at 2,139, Fukushima at 1,684, and Aomori at 1,265. The prefectures with the most injuries and those with the most captures overlap.

What the captures consist of is worth noting. Of the 14,741, 14,618 were killed and 123 were not — released or otherwise handled alive[10]. Non-lethal handling accounts for 0.8%. A capture means, in practice, a cull. The question "cull or coexist" has, in operational terms, already swung all the way to one side.

Against 1,492 in FY2008, that is nearly tenfold. But the figure swings hard year to year — 4,167 in FY2014 against 1,950 in FY2015, more than doubling between adjacent years. Captures track how many bears came out, not how many there are.

Read the distribution, not the total

Look only at the annual total and this reads as a single line: there are more bears. Break it out by month and it gathers into three autumn months; by prefecture, into two Tohoku prefectures. A total tells you the size of a problem; it does not tell you where it is happening. What gets lost when a figure is compressed into one number is the same point set out in an introduction to statistical literacy（このサイトの記事）.

Not cull versus coexist

The bear problem is often framed as "cull, or coexist." But that very opposition misreads what is happening. Push the cull, and if the boundary is dissolving, the next bear comes down. Raise the banner of coexistence, and without people to manage the buffer, contact cannot be avoided. The focus is not culling versus coexistence. It is who manages the boundary between people and the wild, and how. It lies in the hole left where those hands used to be.

Depopulation has outrun the capacity to manage the boundary

Bears coming into settlements are the consequence of depopulation showing itself from the side of the wild. Population decline shows first in the statistics, next in abandoned fields, and then in the collapse of the boundary, in the form of a bear. Sightings can be read as a lagging indicator that depopulation has outrun the capacity to manage the boundary. A poor nut crop is a yearly swing, but the absence of hands to keep the boundary is a structure that deepens year by year.

Who carries the satoyama

Some years the nuts come in, some years they fail. But unless the hands that tend the boundary return, in every poor-crop year bears will come down, and the injuries will repeat. Beyond counting the heads culled, the question of who tends the satoyama, this boundary, remains. How those hands are rebuilt will set the distance between bears and people.

Further Reading

• クマはなぜ人里に出てきたのか (Why Have Bears Come Out to Where People Live)（外部サイト、新しいタブで開きます） (Yoshiyuki Nagahata, Junposha, 2024) — a nature photographer walks the field in Tohoku and reads the background to bears entering settlements from the change in forest and satoyama. (In Japanese.)

References

On Bear-Inflicted Injuries (Preliminary Figures) — Ministry of the Environment. Ministry of the Environment, Nature Conservation Bureau

On the State of Bear Sightings (Preliminary Figures) — Ministry of the Environment. Ministry of the Environment, Nature Conservation Bureau

Materials on the Range and Damage of Bears (FY2023) — Ministry of the Environment. Ministry of the Environment, Nature Conservation Bureau

The State of Abandoned Farmland and Measures — Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, Rural Development Bureau

Securing and Training Those Who Manage Wildlife in a Shrinking Society — Ministry of the Environment, Wildlife Division. Ministry of the Environment