Japanese authorities confirmed Friday the first fatal bear attack of 2026, with media reports saying police were also investigating two other possible cases.<\/p>\n
The victim, reportedly a 55-year-old woman, died on April 21 in Iwate Prefecture, an environment ministry official said.<\/p>\n
Media reports said police were investigating two other deaths potentially caused by bears.<\/p>\n
One body was discovered elsewhere in the Iwate region on Thursday and another in a forest in Yamagata prefecture on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Police confirmed that two people had died but could not immediately verify other details.<\/p>\n
Last year, Japan saw a spate of deadly bear attacks, with a record 13 people killed.<\/p>\n
In the latest suspected attack in Iwate, Kumagai Chiyoko, 69, went missing after going to a mountain forest to pick edible wild plants, broadcaster NHK reported.<\/p>\n
Police and rescuers launched a search on Thursday in the forest where her car was parked and found her body shortly after 8:00 a.m., NHK reported.<\/p>\n
She reportedly had injuries on her face and head that appeared to have been caused by an animal’s claws.<\/p>\n
City officials said local hunters were expected to begin patrolling the area on Friday, according to the broadcaster.<\/p>\n
In the fiscal year between April 1, 2025, and March 31, 2026, bear attacks injured 216 people, according to environment ministry data.<\/p>\n
This marked a sharp increase from the previous year, when three people died and 82 were hurt.<\/p>\n
Scientists say the crisis is being driven by a fast-growing bear population, combined with a falling human population.<\/p>\n
Last year also saw a poor acorn harvest pushing bears to seek food elsewhere.<\/p>\n
Scrambling to respond, the government has deployed troops to help with trapping and hunting the animals.<\/p>\n
Riot police have also been tasked with shooting them, with several thousand of the animals killed every year.<\/p>\n
Brown bears are found only in the main northern island of Hokkaido, where their population has doubled over three decades to more than 11,500 as of 2023.<\/p>\n
Japanese black bears, meanwhile, are common across large parts of the country including on the main island of Honshu which includes Iwate and Yamagata.<\/p>\n
In 2024, the government added bears to the list of animals subject to population control, reversing protection that had helped the mammals thrive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Japanese authorities confirmed Friday the first fatal bear attack of 2026, with media reports saying police were also…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":18986,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1885,6659,15017,7438,8,33,15016],"class_list":{"0":"post-18985","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-japan","8":"tag-bears","9":"tag-death","10":"tag-environment-ministry","11":"tag-iwate","12":"tag-japan","13":"tag-nihon","14":"tag-yamagata"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18985"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18985\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}