A family in northern Japan called police after finding a bear in their kitchen, an official said Wednesday, as anxiety over the animal\u00a0grows following a surge in deadly maulings.<\/p>\n
Bears have killed at least five people in Japan since April 1, all in the northern region of Tohoku, after a record 13 fatal attacks across the country in the last fiscal year, according to the environment ministry.<\/p>\n
Police in the northern region of Iwate, which is part of Tohoku, received a call Monday evening from a family saying a bear had intruded into their home.<\/p>\n
The animal \u201copened the fridge, scattering its content nearby,\u201d a local police official said, declining to be named.<\/p>\n
Footprints suggest the bear then \u201cmade its way out through a back door adjacent to the kitchen and also hunted through a bin for food waste,\u201d the official said.<\/p>\n
The incident occurred in the town of Shizukuishi, where at least four other households have reported bear intrusions since July 5, he added.<\/p>\n
In recent months there has been a jump in sightings after the bears emerged from hibernation, and more bears have been straying into towns and cities.<\/p>\n
In June, dozens of police, hunters and city officials needed four days to trap a bear roaming Utsunomiya, north of Tokyo, forcing mass school closures.<\/p>\n
Before that another bear described as \u201cextremely intelligent\u201d \u2014 it opened a window and turned on a tap \u2014 attacked four people at two factories in Fukushima and remained at large for days.<\/p>\n
Scientists attribute the sharp rise in incidents to an increase in the bears\u2019 population, a declining number of people in rural areas and other factors including variations in the availability of bears\u2019 usual food.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A family in northern Japan called police after finding a bear in their kitchen, an official said Wednesday,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":58418,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1886,1885,26899,8,33,17052],"class_list":["post-58417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-japan","tag-animals","tag-bears","tag-hunting","tag-japan","tag-nihon","tag-tohoku"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58417","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=58417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58417\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}