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Bigger and Bolder Population of Bears Incites Fear in Japan
by James Brooke, New York Times EFL, LRR; hat tip to the Brothers Judd. "Bear Injures 3 in Kimono Shop," screamed one headline. "Five Elderly People Injured in Bear Attacks in Three Prefectures," read another. "Japan to Conduct Emergency Survey on Rash of Bear Attacks," Kyodo News wrote, citing a government tally of one person killed and more than 90 injured by bears since April. This fall, rural Japan, with its aging, shrinking population, is peering with increasing nervousness into the deep, dark woods. A bear population that is expanding in numbers and range, increasingly cranky after a record number of typhoons have ruined the acorn harvest, is glaring back. Typhoons make me cranky, too, especially when they mess up the acorn harvest. "These bears are of the new type, they are not scared of people," said Hajime Nakagawa, director of the Shiretoko Museum here, which displays several stuffed brown bears, their sleek coats evoking a diet rich from hunting salmon and trout in mountain streams and lakes. The Shiretoko Peninsula - the name means "end of the earth" in the local Ainu language - is one of Japan's rare patches of wilderness. Because the peninsula is north of a Russian nature reserve, some Japanese contend that the thuggish bears that steal apples and maul farmers are illegal immigrants who paddled here from Russia, across an icy finger of the Sea of Okhotsk. . . . "Durned illegal aliens!" . . . For Japan, a country rarely associated with wilderness and wildlife, the new bear-human ballet is playing out intensely here in Shari, a coastal tourist village on the edge of Shiretoko National Park. . . . Hunting was banned in the park in 1982, giving birth to "a generation of bears that does not fear people," Mr. Nakagawa, a biologist, said. Today, this 188-square-mile park, on the northern tip of Japan's northernmost main island, Hokkaido, has one of the world's densest bear populations, about one bear per square mile. . . . It's a cliche, I know, but the question still must be asked: Bears, why do they eat us? Posted by: Mike 2004-11-08 |
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