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Dozens of hunters and local officials searched for a wild bear on Monday after its three-day rampage through the streets of a Japanese city forced nearly 100 schools to shut down.
The city government of Utsunomiya, located in Tochigi Prefecture north of Tokyo, closed all 94 public primary and junior high schools in the area after receiving more than 10 reports of bear sightings since Saturday, including in a shopping arcade.
"We have vehicles out in areas where a bear was seen to make people aware and to urge them to stay indoors or in vehicles," a city official confirmed, adding that dozens of hunters, police and local officials have been looking for the animal.
It was not clear whether there was one bear or more, he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
In recent years, Japan has seen an increasing number of bear sightings and attacks, especially in urban areas.
A record 13 people were killed by bears in Japan last year, and there has been a jump in encounters as the animals emerge hungry from hibernation.
Nationwide bear sightings topped a record 50,000 in the year ending March, more than doubling the previous record set two years earlier, official data shows.
In Utsunomiya, a regional capital and home to 510,000 residents, there were just two unconfirmed bear sightings in the previous year.
The bear now being hunted was first spotted Saturday morning, north of the city center, and was described as being around one meter (3 feet) long.
A series of sightings followed, including in a residential neighborhood that day, at a shopping arcade on Sunday, and at a park, a high school and a junior school.
Early Monday, residents spotted a bear close to a wholesale market, the city official said.
A Britannica post notes that places such as Russia, Canada, or the United States, with large, uninhabited areas of bear country, naturally experience higher frequencies of bear encounters.
But Japan has also been facing problems with bears for quite a while. The country hosts two species that live primarily in remote mountain and forest habitats: the Ussuri brown bear, which lives on Japan’s northernmost main island of Hokkaido, and the Japanese black bear, which lives on Honshu and Shikoku.
Officials at Japan’s Environment Ministry have reported 50 or more people injured by bears annually since 2014. This figure rose to 213 in 2023. Approximately 220 people were injured in 2025.
In comparison, there are often fewer than 50 bear attacks across the whole of North America each year, which result in about 2–5 deaths annually.
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