5 days ago
Bears attacks sharply on the rise in Japan and they seem to like Koshihikari rice
By Michael Hoffman
Bear terror. We're their victims, they're ours. We're changing their environment, they're invading ours. They don't mean the harm they do – no comfort to those they do it to.
Shukan Gendai (Aug 4) takes us to a rice-growing community in Iwate Prefecture, population 400. Everybody knows everybody, everyone greets everyone, outsiders are rare, intruders unheard of – but the footsteps that roused a local farmer around 5 a.m. on July 1 were assuredly not friendly, or even human. A locked outbuilding on his land bore unmistakable signs of thwarted forced entry. A bear, no doubt. There'd been sightings earlier. An outer kitchen window of the main house was penetrable, but not the inner one. End chapter one.
Chapter two: three days later Seiko Takahashi was found dead in her kitchen. She was 81, living alone, since her husband last year moved to a senior citizens' home. Her son, coming upon her, had a double shock: her death and the claw marks all over her. No mystery as to perpetrator.
The Asian black bear (tsukinowa in Japanese) is 150-odd cms tall, diffident by nature, vegetarian by preference – a dwindling remnant of an officially listed endangered species. Ordinarily it avoids us and we certainly don't seek it out – to each species its own. Its the shrinking – shrunk –natural environment that forces bears into altered ways, into human communities on scavenging expeditions. Hungry, they don't count the cost. Nonhuman, they don't know the cost. Or care. There's no reconciling their interests and ours. We're vulnerable to their famished, frightened or enraged strength, they to our guns – but normally only hunters have guns and hunters are dwindling in Japan faster than bears.
There are other recourses. In 2003 in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, a 63-year-old man used a judo throw against a bear that attacked him while he was picking mushrooms. In 2016 a bear was unlucky enough to charge a black belt karate champion, also 63, fishing quietly in a quiet stream in Gunma Prefecture.
The less physically adept among us admire and envy. We wish we could do that but few can. The 13 years that separate the two stories prove it. Suppose you're not a martial artist – what then? Courage is courage, trained or not. Shukan Gendai tells of a man, a neighbor of the deceased Seiko Takahashi, whose name and age we are not told, who in June, a month before Takahashi's death, plagued by a bear's depredations – the same bear? – grabbed hold of an iron bar and sallied forth, determined to do his best – worst, rather –whatever that might involve. The depredations had included the usual breaking and entry and marks thereof, failed here, successful there. Where successful, the bear pounced on its prey, stored sacks of Koshihikari rice, tearing them to shreds and feasting – a messy feeder but possessed all the same of some discrimination evidently, Koshihikari being a top brand.
There were several near encounters, the bear, not the man, being the one to slink off. But hunger, or maybe some form of ursine pride, stokes courage. And so there they stood one day, bear and man, three meters apart, the man armed with his iron bar, the bear with a radio it had picked up somewhere and which it now hurled – harmlessly, and now the man brandished his bar in earnest. The bear's resistance crumpled, leaving the man in victorious possession of the field – knowing, however, that he has not seen the last of this four-footed antagonist.
What would have been going through his mind as he stood there? He knows – everyone knows; reports are everywhere of bear incursions, assaults and (stretching the sense of the word ) murder – and not only in remote areas. Still fresh in memory is a bear's bursting last November into an Akita city supermarket, where it fed on meat, mauled an employee and remained at large for two days before being captured and killed.
There's no easy solution, Shukan Gendai fears. People are aging and living alone, fields are reverting to jungle, hunting is in decline – in short, the struggle for survival is tilting, if lightly, in the bears' favor. They're an endangered species but so, in a way, are we.
© Japan Today
