Fukushima City on edge as resourceful and violent bear still not found

Cunning bear managed to escape stand-off with police and hunters.

As we’ve been seeing in recent years in Japan, not only has the number of bear encounters and attacks been steadily rising, but it appears bears have been coming closer and closer to populated areas as well.

Once an incident that only those deep in the mountains and forests of Japan had to worry about, more and more people have been spotting the large and powerful animals in unlikely places, like train stations, and now on the outskirts of Fukushima City, a regional population center with a population of 275,000 people.

In the evening of 1 June, Fukushima police started to receive scattered reports of what appeared to be a bear wandering around the Sasakino area in the northwest part of the city. The next morning, the vice principal of Noda Elementary School in the same area was driving to work when a bear suddenly started chasing his car. The street is also a route many students take to the school, but luckily, the bear appeared hours before any kids were outside.

▼ The main area where the bear was active.

Things only intensified after that. At about 6:30 a.m., the Asiatic black bear, measuring about one meter in length, attacked an employee in his 20s approaching the entrance of Fukushima Steel Works. It then charged through a glass door at the company’s building and mauled a man in his 60s inside.

From there, the bear ran off to a residential area, where it jumped clear over a one-meter (three-foot) wall to enter a nearby field. There, it found and attacked a woman in her 80s, injuring her face. The animal then headed about 500 meters (1,640 feet) to the northwest and attacked the 66-year-old guard of the OKI Symfotech manufacturing plant before entering the building.

Police arrived at the site and surrounded OKI Symfotech with the bear inside, evacuating a perimeter around the plant. Other local businesses and Noda Elementary, which was only a block away, closed for the day. The events so far had all unraveled so quickly, the municipal government could only catch up by this point and issued an emergency cull order around noon that day, granting the local hunters’ association permission to shoot and kill the bear.

However, by this time, it was too late. The bear had managed to hole itself up in a building full of machinery and chemicals. One misplaced shot or a ricochet could have triggered a fire or explosion. Unable to use live ammunition, the hunters resorted to tranquilizer darts, but the bear was in such an agitated state that its own adrenaline counteracted the sedative when struck by a dart.

For the next 35 hours, the standoff continued with the bear surrounded and hunters unable to kill it. Traps were set up to catch it when it would finally try to leave one of the building’s exit points. However, at approximately 11:00 p.m. on 3 June, the animal managed to unlatch one of OKI Symfotech’s windows, climb out undetected, and flee into the night.

▼ A news report with various times the bear was caught on camera

It wasn’t until the following morning that anyone realized the bear had escaped. The cordon around the manufacturing plant was removed, but citizens remained on high alert. Schools and some businesses remained closed, while some operated on increased security, such as disabling automatic doors.

Despite a few scattered reports, one of which turned out to be a wild boar, there were no significant encounters with bears in the area. On 5 June, OKI Symfotech reopened for business and Noda Elementary resumed in-person classes, but requested all students be dropped off by car. Meanwhile, authorities continued searching for the bear, even employing thermal imaging drones, but the creature’s location has not been found.

It might have just returned to wherever it came from, but it’s hard to rest easy when an animal that managed to overcome several obstacles and even outwit the police remains at large. Hopefully, things will return to a state of normalcy for residents soon, but it certainly seems like these kinds of problems are going to get worse if nothing is done on a larger scale to keep bears away from inhabited areas.

Source: FNN Online Prime, Fukushima TV, Yomiuri Shimbun Online, Asahi Shimbun, My Game News Flash
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