Overview
- The central government formalised a 2026 white paper and population-control roadmap that eases hunting rules and sets targets to reduce bears to roughly 62–67% of current levels in some prefectures by 2030.
- Fatal attacks have surged, with a record 13 deaths in the fiscal year April 2025–March 2026 and six more deaths reported since April 1, prompting wider public-safety measures.
- Local governments are expanding culling: Nagano doubled its annual cull cap to 675 and Tokyo’s metro government approved lifting a 20-year hunting ban to allow licensed hunters to cull about 34 bears a year starting next April.
- At the same time, regions, firms and communities are deploying nonlethal tools — AI movement cameras, rapid-response drones, animatronic 'wolf' deterrents and the Kumamap incident app — but those measures face high costs and limits to national scale-up.
- Experts say the rise in encounters stems from rural depopulation, fewer hunters and climate-linked shortages of wild food that push bears toward towns, creating a short-term safety focus that raises ethical and long-term effectiveness questions about culling versus coexistence strategies.