Record-Breaking Damage: Bears Threatening Urban Areas and the Abnormal Reality of 2025

Japan now stands at a critical crossroads in its relationship with wild animals. In 2025, the number of people injured or killed by bears has reached an all-time high since statistics began, an unprecedented and abnormal situation. This crisis is not only about the sheer number of incidents; the nature of the damage has changed in deeply troubling ways. Most serious of all is the fact that the death toll has reached 13. This shows that the issue can no longer be dismissed as a localized “pest” problem, but has become a public safety and public health threat tied to national security.

The qualitative shift in this threat can be summed up in one point: bears are increasingly “appearing in urban areas.” Traditionally, bear encounters were viewed as accidental incidents that occurred when people entered the animals’ habitat in the mountains—for hiking, foraging wild plants, and so on. But what has become strikingly clear in 2025 is the growing number of cases in which bears intrude into human living spaces—residential neighborhoods and city streets—and attack residents there. There have even been reports of bears “that previously attacked people” reappearing. This suggests that the current culling and management systems are failing to reliably remove even individuals already identified as dangerous, laying bare the limits of the existing framework.

The Japanese government has not simply stood by and watched this unfold. On September 12, 2025, as a first step, it implemented an “Emergency Rifle Hunting System” that allows hunters, under certain conditions, to use firearms against bears that appear in urban areas. This system was designed to relax some of the strict regulations of the Wildlife Protection and Management Law and enable faster responses. Yet barely two months after this September legal revision, the government was forced to adopt an even stronger and more extraordinary measure: allowing police officers to use rifles. This fact paradoxically demonstrates that the “emergency rifle hunting” system introduced in September was wholly inadequate to halt the dangerous situation on the ground. When the system was launched, experts already warned that “many issues remain, including ensuring safe firing, training hunters, and improving municipal decision-making.” Those concerns have now materialized.

Deployment of Police Firearms Units: New Rules for Rifle Use and Operational Details

In the autumn of 2025, faced with rapidly worsening bear-related incidents, the Japanese government made an unprecedented decision: to directly deploy the state’s public security resources. Following approval by the National Public Safety Commission on November 6, a partial amendment to the “Regulations on the Special Use and Handling of Firearms by Police Officers, etc.” came into force on November 13. The core of this revision is that, when there is an imminent threat to human life or physical safety, police officers may officially use rifles to kill bears.

Notably, it will not be regular patrol officers from local police boxes who carry out these operations. The designated culling units are firearms countermeasure teams within the riot police units of each prefectural police force. According to the National Police Agency, these teams have traditionally been responsible for missions such as “guarding and protecting critical facilities,” “responding to hijackings,” and “suppressing serious violent crimes”—that is, dealing with terrorism and heavily armed criminals. Now, “bear culling” has formally been added to that mission list. In effect, this elevates the threat level of bears appearing in urban areas, within the police organization, to a category comparable to that of armed terrorists and hijackers.

The fact that rifles will be used also underscores the seriousness of this decision. The standard handguns carried by police officers lack sufficient stopping power against large animals with tough hides and thick layers of fat, such as bears. Experts have long warned that half-hearted attacks risk merely wounding a bear, making it more aggressive and dangerous. By contrast, rifles—with their high penetration and killing power—are deemed essential equipment for reliably stopping a bear at distance and ensuring the safety of both citizens and officers.

Concrete operational plans have been drawn up. For the time being, the focus will be on Iwate and Akita Prefectures, where the damage is most severe, and firearms countermeasure teams from other prefectures will be dispatched there for support. The team structure is also noteworthy: each unit will be composed of four people—two snipers, one on-site commander, and one liaison in charge of coordination with local authorities. These teams are expected to carry out culling operations under the Police Duties Execution Act in urgent situations where there is no time for municipalities to request or decide on the use of the emergency hunting system. The fact that each team includes not just shooters but also a “coordination officer” for local governments shows that the National Police Agency understands the biggest obstacle in bear culling is not merely “marksmanship,” but the decision to open fire itself—and the legal responsibility that follows.

Why Hunters Can’t Pull the Trigger: The “Sunagawa Incident” and the Roots of “Shooting Phobia”

Why has Japan’s bear-control policy become so deadlocked that it now requires intervention from elite police units equipped for counterterrorism? For overseas readers in particular, the key to answering this question lies in the severe dysfunction faced by the local hunting associations—the civilian hunters who had previously been the primary agents of bear culling. Their problem is not that they lack the technical ability to shoot, but that they have been pushed into a situation where, legally, they cannot shoot.

This structural dilemma is symbolized by what is commonly known as the “Sunagawa Incident,” which occurred in August 2018 in Sunagawa City, Hokkaido. The sequence of events lays bare the contradictions in Japan’s bear-control system:

A bear cub appeared in an urban area.

City officials and police on the scene asked Mr. Haruo Ikegami, then 70 years old, head of the local hunting association branch and a veteran with 30 years of hunting experience, to kill the animal.

After ensuring safety—such as positioning himself with an 8-meter embankment as a backdrop—Ikegami killed the cub with a single shot.

Two months later, however, it was not the on-scene officers but Hokkaido Prefectural Police headquarters that filed a written accusation against him for violations of the Wildlife Protection Law and the Firearms and Swords Control Law, based solely on a flat map showing that “there were buildings beyond the trajectory of the bullet.”

Prosecutors ultimately decided not to indict him (dropping the case with a stay of prosecution).

Nevertheless, the Hokkaido Public Safety Commission revoked his firearms license—a move that, for a hunter, is tantamount to a death sentence.

Ikegami sued to overturn the revocation. In 2021, the Sapporo District Court ruled in his favor, calling the revocation “significantly unreasonable and illegal.” But in 2024, the High Court reversed that judgment, and the revocation became final.

The impact of the Sunagawa Incident on the hunting community nationwide has been devastating. A veteran hunter who took on personal risk at the request of authorities to protect local residents was prosecuted for his actions and ultimately stripped of the firearms that formed the basis of his livelihood. This outcome had a powerful chilling effect on hunting association members throughout Japan.

“Pulling the trigger might save the town—but if the police later decide it was ‘dangerous firing,’ I could lose my livelihood and my reputation.” This fear has spread among hunters as a kind of “shooting phobia” (Happō Kyōfushō). At the heart of the Sunagawa Incident lies a pattern in which municipal officials and on-site police, driven by residents’ anxieties, request culling, yet leave the final legal judgment and responsibility for firing entirely to the individual hunter—and then, if anything goes wrong, cast him aside as solely responsible.

Discharging a firearm in an urban area always carries serious risk: ricochets, stray bullets, and other unintended consequences. For a fee of only tens of thousands of yen per animal—sometimes not even enough to cover fuel costs—an individual hunter is expected to shoulder the risk of criminal penalties or civil lawsuits that could reach tens or even hundreds of millions of yen. This extreme imbalance between risk and compensation has made rapid urban-area culling structurally impossible. The need for police intervention stems not from a lack of “skill” among hunters, but from the absence of any legal safety net to protect them, which has created a “vacuum of responsibility.”

Welcome Relief and New Anxiety: How Police Intervention Exposes a “Responsibility Vacuum”

The November 2025 decision allowing police to use rifles was met with “strong approval” from hunting associations themselves. When the head of the Hokkaido Hunting Association expressed his welcome, it was not simply out of a desire to see troublesome bears removed. As symbolized by the Sunagawa Incident, what has weighed more heavily on hunters than confronting the animals themselves is the burden of legal and social responsibility after they pull the trigger. The fact that the state—through the police—will now officially shoulder that cross has brought a sense of genuine relief.

But this new framework will not solve everything. At the same time, media reports underscore that “significant concerns remain.” These concerns fall roughly into two categories.

First are the technical concerns. Firearms countermeasure teams are professionals in precision shooting against human targets, but they are not wildlife experts with deep knowledge of bear ecology, behavior, and tracking in mountainous terrain. As TV commentators have noted, because standard police handguns lack sufficient stopping power, specialized training will be essential to ensure safe and effective use of rifles. Using high-powered rifles against unpredictable wild animals in complex urban environments carries a constant risk of ricochets and secondary damage, requiring extremely advanced skills and judgment.

Second, and more fundamentally, is the unresolved question highlighted by the Sunagawa Incident: who bears ultimate responsibility for pulling the trigger? Having a “local government liaison” accompany police sniper teams is an attempt to clarify the lines of responsibility. But this is not a true “solution”; it is, at best, a transfer of responsibility from individual hunters to a state institution. If, in the future, a rifle round fired by a police officer were ever to harm a civilian, debates over who is responsible would escalate into issues far beyond those faced by any one hunter—potentially triggering massive state liability lawsuits and even political crises that could shake the very stability of the cabinet.

This police intervention marks a historic turning point in Japan’s management of the boundary between humans and wild animals. It represents the moment when the state effectively acknowledged that the “buffer zone” once maintained by hunters’ goodwill, volunteer spirit, and self-sacrifice—ambiguous yet robust forms of mutual aid within local communities—has collapsed under the weight of aging and legal risk. To fill the resulting “responsibility vacuum,” the state has stepped in with “public assistance,” intervening directly at the very edge of citizens’ daily lives with the most immediate form of force at its disposal: rifles. In this sense, the bear issue is a microcosm of the broader social transformations confronting Japan’s rural communities.