AKITA, Japan — The bear came through the automatic doors of a supermarket in the city of Akita at 9:20 a.m. on Oct. 6, walked the length of the produce aisle and left through the loading dock, pausing, according to the security footage, to eat a persimmon. No one was hurt. It was the fourth bear inside a building in the prefecture in two weeks.
Japan is in the midst of the worst year for bear encounters since records began. The environment ministry reported 212 people injured by bears nationwide from April through September, and 11 killed, surpassing the previous record year of 2023 with the most dangerous months still ahead. Akita Prefecture, in the north of the main island, accounted for 48 of the injuries. Sightings in the prefecture through September numbered about 5,400, more than three times the five-year average.
Biologists attribute the surge to a combination of factors. The beech and oak mast on which Asiatic black bears fatten before hibernation failed across much of the Tohoku region this year, sending animals into lower valleys in search of persimmons, chestnuts and garbage. The bear population has grown, to an estimated 44,000 nationally from about 15,000 in the 1990s, as hunting declined. And the countryside that once formed a buffer between forest and town has thinned: abandoned farmland, which the agriculture ministry puts at about 420,000 hectares nationwide, has grown back into scrub that bears use as cover, and villages that once had dozens of residents keeping watch now have a handful.
“A bear 30 years ago met a farmer in every field between the mountain and the town. Now it meets no one until the supermarket,” said Dr. Hiroshi Kudo, a wildlife ecologist at Akita Prefectural University. “We have not been invaded. We have withdrawn.”
The prefecture has responded with an emergency program that pays licensed hunters 50,000 yen, about $330, for each bear culled in designated zones, and has authorized police to use firearms in urban areas under a national law revised last year. Hunters have killed about 2,100 bears in Akita since April, a figure that animal welfare groups have criticized and that Dr. Kudo said was unlikely to change the pattern. The average age of a licensed hunter in the prefecture is 68.
In the town of Kazuno, near the Aomori border, Setsuko Narita, 79, has stopped working her vegetable plot after 4 p.m. and carries a bell and a radio. Her neighbors, she said, are mostly gone. “There were 60 houses on this road. Now there are 14 with people in them,” she said. “The bear knows which ones are empty. It is smarter than the government.”
Schools in several districts have moved recess indoors, and the prefecture has distributed 30,000 bear bells to children. Tourism operators in the hot-spring valleys, which depend on autumn foliage visitors, report cancellations. The environment ministry has convened a panel to consider whether the hunting season should be lengthened and whether to pay rural residents to maintain cleared margins around villages, a measure that has reduced encounters in trials in Nagano.
At the supermarket in Akita, the produce manager has moved the persimmons to the back of the store. “It is not a solution,” he said. “It is the only thing I can control.”
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 12, 2026, Section A, Page 5 of the European edition with the headline: In Northern Japan, a Record Autumn of Bear Encounters Tests a Countryside With Fewer People to Watch for Them.
