Bear Injuries Hit a Record 216 in Japan — Depopulation Has Emptied the Hands That Tended the Boundary
By Japan's Environment Ministry, bear-inflicted injuries hit a record 216, with 13 deaths, in FY2025, and sightings reached 50,801, 2.1 times FY2023. But a poor nut crop is only the trigger. Depopulation has drained the hands that tended the satoyama; abandoned farmland is turning, in quality, back into forest; and the buffer between people and the wild is dissolving from within. This reads not culling versus coexistence, but the vacancy of who manages the boundary.
TL;DR
- Bear-inflicted injuries hit a record 216 with 13 deaths in FY2025, and sightings reached 50,801, 2.1 times FY2023
- A poor nut crop is only the trigger; the place of injury shifts from forest to town over the seasons, reaching 67% urban by December
- Depopulation has drained the hands that tended the satoyama, abandoned farmland is turning back into forest, and the buffer between people and the wild is dissolving from within
In FY2025, bear-inflicted injuries hit 216 with 13 deaths, and sightings 50,801, both records. A poor nut crop is the trigger, but on the receiving side, depopulation has drained satoyama upkeep and abandoned farmland has turned, in quality, back into forest, so the buffer is lost. How the hands that manage the boundary are rebuilt will set the distance between bears and people.
What Is Happening
Bear injuries hit a record 216, 13 deaths, and 50,801 sightings in FY2025. The place of injury shifts from forest to town over the seasons
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, the most since records began in FY2006. It surpassed FY2023's 198, until now the record, in both cases and deaths. Sightings, too, reached 50,801, 2.1 times FY2023, and permitted captures 14,745, both records.
It is not, however, a steady climb. Injuries in FY2024 fell to 82. 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.
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%. Bears are entering the human sphere.
Background & Context
A poor nut crop is only the trigger. Depopulation has drained satoyama upkeep, abandoned farmland turns to forest, and the buffer dissolves
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.
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. 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. 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 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). 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.
Reading the Structure
Culling versus coexistence misreads it. The focus is who manages the boundary, and sightings are a lagging indicator of depopulation
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.
Bears coming into settlements are the consequence of depopulation made visible 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.
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) (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
