Bear attacks in Japan hit a record high, with 13 people dying and more than 220 injured between April 2025 and March 2026, compared to three deaths and 82 injuries during the same period the previous year. As fall approaches, the season when bears prepare for winter, authorities have raised the alert level.
The increase in encounters between humans and bears is linked to the decline in rural populations after World War II, when millions of young people moved to cities.
Liam Adcock, a wildlife researcher at the Bichiyo Wildlife Research Center in Nagano, explained that the decline of farmland that used to form a buffer zone between villages and forests has made bears move closer to residential areas.
He added that the tightening of hunting restrictions and the decline in the number of hunters contributed to an increase in the numbers of the two indigenous bear species in Japan, the Hokkaido brown bear and the Asiatic black bear, whose number in the country is estimated at more than 57,000.
Climate change has also exacerbated the problem, as the vegetables, berries and acorns that bears depend on for food are maturing later and becoming less abundant. “But they know that there is one source of food that has not changed: human waste,” Adcock added.
This has led to hungry bears coming closer to towns than ever before, with 50,000 sightings recorded last year.
In a government report on the environment for 2026, the government described bears as a “serious threat to public safety and security,” while easing hunting restrictions and developing a plan to reduce their numbers.
The plan aims to reduce bear numbers in a number of provinces to between 62% and 67% of their current levels by 2030, through organized killing operations.
Despite the continued general cultural preference for coexistence with bears, the priority has shifted to ensuring the safety of residents and quickly dealing with any threat, Adcock said.
He continued: "Fireworks are often set off in towns to scare the bears away. But when that is not enough, the police or army are called, which often means killing the bears, especially during the day and when people's lives are threatened."
He added: "We want to prove that coexistence with bears through non-lethal methods, including the use of technology, is possible."
High-tech alternatives
Areas where there are frequent encounters with bears, such as Gunma, Toyama, and Ishikawa, have begun installing movement-detection cameras in the forests surrounding residential areas. These cameras use artificial intelligence to identify bears and alert officials, which allows residents to be warned and removed from towns.
In Hokkaido, KDDI Smart Drone has set up a drone launch pad in the town of Shintotsukoa that can take off within 10 minutes of spotting a bear and tracking its movement until help teams arrive. Priority is given to non-lethal methods to keep bears away.
Artificial intelligence and drones are “very effective at spotting bears, and very useful in deterring them,” Adcock said.
In the United States, a small study conducted in 2024 found that drones succeeded in keeping bears away from human-populated areas in 91% of cases in Montana.
But this technology is difficult for individuals to use in practice, so comes Monster Wolf, a solar-powered robot that mimics the howl of the extinct Japanese wolf to scare away bears.
The robot costs $4,000 and was primarily developed to protect agricultural crops from bears.
Motohiro Miyasaka, managing director of Wolf Kamui, which markets it, told CNN that its sales have doubled "as bear sightings have increased in urban areas of Japan since last year."
The company is working on developing a portable version in the form of a stuffed doll about 20 cm in size, intended for fishing, camping and hiking lovers. “The mini version of Monster Wolf is scheduled to be tested in late 2026,” Miyasaka said.
But these systems do not constitute a magic solution, according to Tokyo-based engineer Daniel Kuka. He explained to CNN that “using artificial intelligence, drones, and robots is expensive, and developing, using, and expanding them across the country is not easy.”
He added that it may save lives in some cases, but it does not provide residents and hikers with immediate information about the level of danger.
In August 2025, a fatal bear attack on a hiker on Mount Rausu in Hokkaido prompted Kuka to research data on bear incidents across Japan.
“There was no single, practical place to go to find out the level of risk,” he said. “The information was distributed among many local sources, and was published by prefectures and municipalities in different formats, from PDF files, local maps and Excel files to press releases and Japanese-only pages, which made verifying the risks of a particular route or destination difficult.”
Kuka decided to make this information more accessible before people venture out into the open, and founded Cooma Map, a bear incident monitoring platform that relies on local government data, national news, and verified resident reports.
“When people realize the extent of the danger, they can better prepare and avoid surprise encounters,” Koka said. “Kuma Map helps people make better decisions when in bear habitats.”
By early August, the app had registered nearly 6 million users, and had monitored 156,631 public reports of bear incidents, including 821 reports from residents that were reviewed.
Conventional means of deterrence
Adcock acknowledges the potential of technology to protect bears, but stresses that dealing with the problem often requires people on the ground.
For this reason, the Bechio Wildlife Research Center recommends using Japan's traditional "deterrence technique": dogs trained to hunt down bears and drive them away.
Adcock said that the Japanese had previously bred semi-wild dogs that chased bears away from cities, adding that his organization used Karelian-Finnish bear dogs to track them, and their barking while chasing them kept them away from residential areas, without harming them.
He continued: "Although encounters with bears have nearly doubled compared to last year, the towns we work with have recorded the lowest number of such incidents in years. This method is effective, and we hope that other regions and countries will adopt this method. In general, other countries can benefit from Japan's experience in efficiently employing modern technology, along with non-lethal methods such as the use of bear dogs."
