Japan's unprecedented bear cull: A conservation success story turned deadly

Every summer, millions of people escape the heat and humidity of Tokyo by heading to the tranquil resort town of Karuizawa in Japan’s Nagano prefecture – just an hour by bullet train from the capital. Here, at the foot of Mount Asama, visitors stroll bamboo-lined pathways, cycle in verdant highlands, and practise the wellness ritual of shinrin-yoku, bathing among the cool hinoki forests. It would be the ideal nature retreat – if it wasn’t for the bears.

From June to August, bears often move close to Karuizawa, feeding on the mulberries, ants, leaves and cherry blossoms that grow near the town. Unlike nuts, these foods are low in calories, spurring the bears to seek out further sustenance. “They’re more likely to get close to residential spaces to see what they can find,” says Amelia Hiorns, a British zoologist who previously worked with Picchio Wildlife Research Centre in the town. “This combines with the busiest season for tourists.”

Picchio, a small Japanese conservation and nature education group, has been working to improve coexistence between bears and people in Karuizawa and the surrounding region since the 1990s. Staff respond to reported bear sightings with one of their three Karelians – a dog breed trained in the western US to chase away bears. When dogs aren’t enough, the Picchio team tranquilises and relocates bears deep in the forest.

Today, Karuizawa’s approach has few parallels in Japan, as conflicts between bears and humans surge to unprecedented levels across the country.

Last year, bears attacked more than 230 people in the country, with 13 people killed, making it the deadliest year on record. Most attacks were in the mountainous northern prefectures of Akita and Iwate, where record-breaking heat affected the growth of beech nuts and acorns that bears rely on to fatten up for hibernation. Diminished human populations in Japan’s rural hinterlands, with orchards and woodlands left abandoned, exacerbated the situation as bears descended into villages in search of food.

The attacks dominated national and international news. Foreign governments – including the UK – issued travel advice warning of heightened bear risk. Insurance companies began offering specialised “bear insurance” to cover repairs to ransacked properties. Farmers installed animatronic wolves with glowing red eyes to frighten off the animals. Warning posters adorned lamp-posts. One Japanese company promoted a private bear attack shelter.

In Karuizawa, Hiroo Tamatani, the leader of Picchio’s bear team, says it has already captured 19 bears this year and responded to more than 130 sightings and incidents – up about 20% since this time last year. But there has been no rise in the actual number of bear damage incidents. After news coverage of the attacks, people are simply more aware of bears. Hiorns says: “People would be seeing little molehills in their garden and think it was bear poop … We would get calls asking if it was safe to come to Karuizawa. People lost business because of it.”

Central to the rise in bear attacks, the national government says, is a lack of skilled hunters to help manage the population. Local associations have struggled to attract new members, with the number of licensed hunters falling by more than half since 1975. Left with few options, last year, the government relaxed the rules for shooting bears in populated areas, as officials laid traps across the country.

The result: from April 2025 through January 2026, Japan culled more than 14,000 bears, government data shows. That included about 12,000 Asiatic black bears (Ursus thibetanus) and 2,000 brown bears (Ursus arctos).

The high death toll has raised concerns among conservationists. Asiatic black bears are deemed vulnerable to extinction by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), with fewer than 60,000 remaining worldwide. “If this level of trapping continues, we believe regional extinctions are a real possibility. We feel a profound sense of crisis,” says Yuko Muroya, chair of the Japan Bear and Forest Society (Kumamori), which focuses on conservation and coexistence.

Japan is one of the Asiatic black bear’s last strongholds, with an estimated 42,000 bears. Scientists say that figure is likely to be an undercount, but no one really knows how many bears exist in the country.

Still, removing what could amount to a quarter of the country’s population has seemingly done little to end conflict. Since April, six people have been killed and more than 35 attacked across at least nine prefectures – including some close to Tokyo – according to government statistics. In June, one Japanese city suspended nearly 100 schools after a bear was spotted in the area for the first time.

Muroya says it is clear Japan’s heavy-handed approach to stopping the assaults is not working. Yet the government has announced a target of culling another 8,800 bears this fiscal year. “A government strategy focused solely on reducing bear numbers will not solve the bear problem until bears themselves are driven to extinction,” she says.

The scale of bear culling in Japan is unrivalled in the modern era. Most countries, including Canada, Russia and the US, permit the legal hunt of less than 10% of their respective brown bear and American black bear populations – neither of which is considered endangered.

In India, where aggressive sloth bears (Melursus ursinus) attack hundreds and kill dozens of people every year, authorities estimate that fewer than 100 bears are destroyed in return – often through retaliatory killings rather than government mandate.

Only Sweden and Slovenia come close to Japan’s statistics. In 2024, the Swedish government permitted hunters to kill about 20% of the country’s brown bears. Last year, Slovenia approved a cull for one-fifth of its dense brown bear population.

“It’s a big reaction,” says biologist Dave Garshelis, co-chair of the IUCN’s bear specialist group and its Asiatic black bear expert team. “I think the [Japanese] government felt compelled to just get rid of these bears … This happened all of a sudden and they had no other alternative.”

Until last year, Japan had adopted a more conservative approach. From 2008 to 2018, the country culled between 1,000 and 4,500 bears every year, alongside legal sport hunting of about 500 a year. That number, however, had been ticking up, with more than 9,000 bears killed in 2023-24 – another bad food year for the animals that led to six human fatalities.

Whether or not Japan’s bear cull ultimately poses a global conservation concern, “really depends on how many they have”, says Garshelis.

Bears are notoriously hard to count, owing in part to their solitary and wide-ranging nature. Japan last attempted to put some parameters around its population in 2011, tallying between 13,000 and 21,000 Asiatic black bears by aggregating prefecture survey estimates. Since then, officials have said there are 42,000 – but no new study has been conducted.

Shinsuike Koike an ecologist at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, leads the Japan Bear Network, a nonprofit promoting coexistence through research. He is sceptical not just of the national figures, but also of global estimates. “In many countries, even the distribution of Asiatic black bears is not well understood,” he says. “I think it is impossible to estimate the global population with high accuracy.”

In 2023, Koike says that in one study area of central Japan they found the Asiatic black bear population was growing at a rate of between 11% and 12% a year. He adds that under the right environmental conditions, it is possible that population growth in some parts of western Japan may reach 15%.

That would mean, without hunting or culls, the country’s bear population would double every five years. Under such a scenario, killing 15% of bears every year would keep the population stable. Anything greater would trigger a decline.

Globally, the IUCN says the Asiatic black bear population is shrinking. A 2024 study in the journal Scientific Reports found that the Asiatic black bear’s worldwide range has contracted by roughly half compared with records of distribution from the 19th and 20th centuries.

“Animal welfare groups often claim the Asiatic black bear is an endangered species, but that is from a global perspective, and it should not be brought into Japan’s bear issue,” Koike says.

Garshelis agrees with Koike that falling populations in, say, Vietnam or Laos should have little bearing on Japan’s management. “If you’re in Japan and you’re having people being mauled by bears, I don’t think they have the responsibility to the species as a whole in terms of the other countries.”

The hazard, he says, is if authorities think they are slashing the population by a quarter only to find out they halved the bears’ numbers because their estimates were inaccurate.

A spokesperson with Japan’s ministry of environment says a new nationwide bear survey was initiated this year, and will take an estimated three years to complete.

The tragedy that has unfolded in Japan over the past 16 months is essentially a macabre outcome of a conservation success story. Since the 1970s, Asiatic black bears have recolonised much of their former range on Japan’s largest island of Honshu. As people have traded village life for cities, farmland has returned to woodland, connecting bear habitat across thousands of kilometres.

Of the 18 countries where Asiatic black bears are still found, “Japan has done the best job of them all as far as conserving this species,” Garshelis says. “The issue is they didn’t plan ahead for conservation success.”

While scientists knew Asiatic black bears were generally more aggressive than American black bears – their closest relative – “the scale of things came as a surprise”, Garshelis says. In the Himalayas, Asiatic black bears have been known to attack humans. Government data from the Indian state of Uttarakhand – where the bears were last estimated in 2008 to number nearly 2,000 – shows the bears attacked 1,972 people and killed another 68 over the past 25 years – an average of about 80 attacks a year.

“We haven’t really seen before what happens with Asiatic black bears when they reach a really high population,” Garshelis says.

But Japan’s booming bear population has now run up against a sharp drop in forest foods. Kumamori’s researchers are documenting how the climate crisis is altering Japan’s forests. They have witnessed widespread dieback of Mongolian oak, acorns destroyed by gray weevils, poor seed production in Japanese beech and sharp declines in pollinating insects that has led to sparse berry yields.

Critics say the spate of attacks in 2023 should have been a wake-up call for the government to adopt more proactive measures to prevent bear conflicts, rather than rely on hunting to severely slash numbers. “Despite the severe degradation of natural forests caused by climate change, bear specialists and the government simply watch the bears that come down from the mountains,” Muroya says.

Kumamori plants nut-bearing trees, hoping to encourage the bears to stay in the woods. “In the past, Japan successfully maintained a separation between people and bears. We should learn how our ancestors achieved that coexistence. We should also learn from other countries, many of which have moved beyond policies focused solely on culling,” Muroya says.

Studies from Canada and the US have found that scatter-shot hunting often fails to reduce conflicts in the long-term, especially compared with the targeted removal of problem individuals.

“From our perspective in North America, it comes across as very old school,” says Geoff York, an American bear biologist whose research focuses on bear-human conflict. “But it’s also what we did back in the day. And we have kind of been there, done that, and realised it didn’t work. Now, we’ve shifted to other things.”

North American bear-proofing strategies may not work well in Japan’s quiet villages where securing garbage, picking fruit and maintaining fences all pose a challenge to older residents.

But officials might consider temporarily feeding bears during a bad nut year to keep them in the mountains, or managing abandoned orchards and fallow farmland to make them less attractive to bears, York says. “We can either learn to live with the bears we share habitat with, or we can remove them. I hope we are moving towards tolerance.”

In November 2025, Japan’s environment ministry released its plan to protect against bear damage, with individual prefectures expected to implement the policies. It includes chasing bears away, installing fences to prevent bears from entering communities, removing fruit trees around homes, and conducting training response exercises for authorities. The ministry has also hired bear management officers for regional offices in eastern Japan, a government spokesperson told the Guardian.

In Karuizawa, Tamatani says residents have grown more fearful of bears. The government now requires more bears to be killed after they are captured, rather than being relocated. But no one in the rural or village areas around Karuizawa has been attacked since 2015, Picchio says, adding their bear-smart measures have worked well. Ultimately, they hope that the government will provide support for more preventive and non-lethal measures beyond Karuizawa.