Long Read! Bears Keep Attacking People in Japan. We Traveled There to Find Out Why

Today's Long Read with Outside Magazine Features Editor Fred Drier, is about an issue you may have seen on social media or in the news: In Japan, bears have been attacking humans at an alarming rate. They attacked more than 100 people in 2025 alone, prompting the Japanese government to send the military to parts of the country to protect towns and villages.

We first saw news stories pop up about Japan’s bear attacks in 2022 and 2023, and the stories often honed in on the weirdest elements: How rural communities were building robotic wolves with glowing red eyeballs to scare bears away from crops. Or, how bears had entered a grocery store and mauled an elderly woman.
In late 2025 we sent Owen Clarke to the Akita prefecture, which is Ground Zero for Japan’s bear problem, to try and figure out what the heck was going on. How were these bear attacks impacting the community? What were these bears actually like? And what about these rural communities made them so susceptible to bears? Owen came back with answers, and a lot more than that.