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The number of bear attacks in Japan reached a record high between April 2025 and March 2026, with 13 people killed and more than 220 injured. This is a sharp increase compared to the same period last year, when three people were killed and 82 injured, and authorities are on high alert as autumn, the peak of bear feeding season, approaches.
The increase in bear encounters in Japan can be traced to the shrinking of rural areas after World War II, when millions of young people began moving to cities. “The boundaries between town and forest have become increasingly blurred for bears as farmland that once provided a buffer against bear invasions has been lost,” said Liam Adcock, a wildlife researcher at the Nagano-based Picchio Wildlife Research Center.
He added that stricter hunting regulations and a decline in hunting populations have made it possible for Japan’s two native bears, the Ezo brown bear and Asiatic black bear, to breed. It is estimated that there are more than 57,000 bears in the country.
Climate change is exacerbating the problem. Adcock said the vegetables, fruits and acorns the bears depend on grow later in the season and are becoming increasingly scarce. “But they know that one food source remains the same: human waste.”
This has brought hungry bears closer to cities than ever before, with 50,000 bear sightings recorded last year.
In its 2026 Environment White Paper, the government relaxed bear hunting rules and introduced a roadmap to control the population, while describing bears as a “serious threat to public safety and peace”. The plan aims to reduce bear populations in many prefectures to 62-67% of their current levels by 2030 through culling.
Mr Adcock said cultural trends still favor coexistence, but priorities had shifted to ensuring immediate public safety and responding effectively to threats.
“Fireworks are often set off in cities to scare away bears,” Adcock said. “But when that’s not enough, police and military are called in. This often equates to euthanizing the bear, especially during the day and there are people around.”
“We want to show that coexistence through non-lethal management, including technology, is completely achievable,” he added.
Areas where bears are more likely to be encountered, such as Gunma, Toyama, and Ishikawa, have begun installing behavior monitoring cameras in forests around residential areas that use AI to identify bears and notify local authorities. The system, developed by Hokuriku Electric Power Co. in conjunction with telecommunications company Kitadori, allows authorities to alert local residents and take steps to keep the bears away from the town, according to reports.
In Hokkaido, KDDI SmartDrone has set up a drone port in the town of Shintotsukawa, where the drone can fly within 10 minutes of sighting a bear and track it until rescue arrives. Non-lethal methods are usually preferred to scare away bears.
AI and drones are “very efficient for detection and very useful for deterrence,” Adcock said. The technology has proven effective in other parts of the world, including the United States, and a small study in 2024 found that drones in Montana were successful in driving bears away from human settlements 91% of the time.
However, this technique is not practical for individuals trying to keep bears off their property. That’s where the solar-powered animatronic “Monster Wolf” comes into play. The $4,000 robot was originally developed to protect crops by imitating the cry of the extinct Japanese wolf to scare away bears.
Motohiro Miyasaka, executive director of Wolf Kamuy, which sells the robot, told CNN that sales have doubled “in response to the frequent sightings of bears in urban areas in Japan since last year.”
The company is developing a portable 8-inch plush version for “those who enjoy mountain stream fishing, camping, and hiking,” Miyasaka said. “Monster Wolf Mini is expected to be tested around the end of 2026.”
But Tokyo-based engineer Daniel Coca says these systems are not a silver bullet. “Using AI, drones and robots costs a lot of money,” he told CNN. “They are not easy to build, use, and scale across the country,” he said, adding that while they save lives in some cases, they do not provide immediate information to local residents or hikers.
In August 2025, a climber was attacked and killed by a bear on Mt. Rausu in Hokkaido, prompting Koca to investigate data on bear incidents across the country. “There was no single practical place where you could check for risk,” he said. “There was already a lot of bear information in Japan, but it was scattered across many local sources. Prefectures and municipalities issued reports in a variety of formats, including PDFs, local maps, Excel files, press notices, and Japanese-only pages. This made it difficult to identify one route or one destination.”
Determined to make public information available to people before they go out, he founded Kumamap, a bear tracking service. Koca claims the app supports coexistence, using local government data, national news, and verified community reporting. “If people understand the risks, they can better prepare and avoid surprises,” he says. “Kumamap is helping people make better decisions in bear habitat.” As of early August, the app had nearly 6 million users and tracked 156,631 public bear incident records, including 821 reviewed community records.
Adcock recognizes the potential of technology to protect bears, but emphasizes that most of the time, people on the ground are needed to address the problem.
Therefore, the Picchio Wildlife Research Center recommends the use of Japan’s unique “deterrence technology”, the bear dog. “Japan used to breed semi-feral dogs (which naturally drove bears away from cities),” Adcock said, adding that the organization uses Finnish Karelian Bear Dogs to reduce human-bear conflicts by tracking, barking and chasing bears away from residential areas without harming them.
“Even though the bear encounter rate is almost double what it was last year, the towns we work with have the lowest bear encounter rates on record in a long time,” he said. “This method is effective and I hope more regions and countries will take notice of it. Generally speaking, the way Japan is efficiently introducing new technologies and non-lethal methods like bear dog is something other countries should learn from.”
