TOKYO — The governor of Japan’s Akita, a mountainous northern prefecture, has called for the military’s help to protect residents from an unprecedented wave of bear attacks.
“Exhaustion on the ground is reaching its limit,” Governor Kenta Suzuki said in an Instagram post on Sunday. He said he planned to ask for help with a bear cull.
Japan’s new defense minister, Shinjiro Koizumi, was set to meet Suzuki on Tuesday morning, according to a schedule released by the ministry.
Suzuki’s plea comes after a bear attack in Akita on Friday in which one person was killed and three others injured, amid a record number of attacks across the country this year.
Local authorities in Akita say 54 people have been killed or injured this year, up from 11 last year, while sightings have increased around sixfold to more than 8,000 incidents.
Rising bear numbers and depopulation in rural areas are increasingly bringing people into contact with bears. Many encounters have occurred in towns and villages where the animals forage for food, sometimes entering homes, and on at least two occasions, supermarkets.
Japan’s aging population also means it has too few qualified hunters to track down bears, which appear less fearful of humans than in the past.
Japanese black bears, common across most of the country, can weigh more than 300 pounds. Brown bears on its northern island of Hokkaido can weigh almost 900 pounds.
Akita has begun “distributing bear-repellent spray along school routes to ensure children’s safety,” Suzuki said in his post.
