TOKYO — Noboru Kuriki had stepped outside his home to pick up his morning newspaper when he saw the bear.
“I thought that was it for me,” said Kuriki, 58, who is a nursing home worker. The Asian black bear bit him on the hand, sending him to the hospital for a week. When Kuriki shouted, the bear ran off.
It was the first bear attack in Kuriki’s village in more than a decade. That night, officials in the rural community of 1,000 began flying a drone to search for the animals.
Bear attacks are on the rise in Japan, and authorities have tried just about everything to protect people. Staging safety drills. Loosening hunting restrictions. Even deploying the military.
The bears are undeterred. A record 238 people were wounded in bear attacks here during the 2025 fiscal year, according to the environment ministry and 13 were killed. Sixty-two more people were wounded, six fatally, during the first five months of fiscal 2026.
So the now country is turning to technology.
AI-generated maps to predict where bears are likely to appear. Robots to patrol the edges of inhabited areas. Drones to detect the animals’ heat signatures, or blast them with pepper spray.
“We’ve reached a point where it’s no longer something that can be dealt with as a side issue,” said Shinsuke Koike, who studies bear ecology at the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology. “The situation has fundamentally changed.”
Reported bear encounters are on pace to surpass last year’s record high. Researchers suggest several possible factors. Japan’s population is declining and more people are moving from rural and mountainous regions to cities, allowing Asian black bears and Ussuri brown bears to expand their habitats. Climate change and a shrinking hunting population might be contributing.
What’s clear is that the animals are increasingly venturing into populated areas for food — and have likely become less wary of people.
“Some bears are now behaving in ways that cross the line of what we’ve considered normal,” said Kiyoshi Yamauchi, who studies wildlife management at Iwate University.
In Showa, the village in northeastern Japan where Kuriki was attacked last October, local officials responded with a drone equipped with thermal imaging cameras. Having acquired it for mountain rescues, they used it to look for more bears.
It can identify not only the heat signatures of the animals, local official Yusuke Kobayashi says, but also the residual heat they leave in their wake.
“Animal trails are usually hard to see,” he said. “The animals pass underneath dense clusters of trees, so you can’t spot the trails with ordinary light. … But with a thermal camera, they show up very clearly.”
The technology has helped authorities capture nine bears, he said. Under guidelines issued by Fukushima prefecture, “captured animals shall either be killed or released, with the decision made on the basis of a comprehensive assessment of the damage caused, the circumstances of their appearance, and other relevant factors.” Showa is handling the bears in accordance with the guidelines.
In Sendai, a city in the northeast, officials are using AI to guide them in determining where to set traps or install electric fencing.
The system, called B Alert, uses cameras and cloud-based monitoring to detect body heat and capture photos and video. It’s been trained on approximately 60,000 images of wildlife to identify bears with an accuracy of up to 99.9 percent, according to Kenji Asai, who leads the project at Hokutsu, one of the businesses developing it.
”Even with systems that upload images to the cloud, it is often difficult to determine whether the animal is actually a bear,” said Keita Katsumata, a Sendai city official. “AI cameras overcome this challenge.”
B Alert is now in use in 29 municipalities, and other cities, towns, schools and organizations have expressed interest in using it, according to Hokutsu.
A research team at Sophia University in Tokyo is using AI to consider a range of criteria, including bear encounter records, census data and satellite imagery and generate a map that estimates areas for potential bear encounters.
Team leader Yusuke Fukazawa said the map is about 70 percent accurate, but could be useful for people traveling to unfamiliar areas.
A startup incubated at the University of Tokyo is testing AI-guided, four-legged robots that can climb steep slopes, pick through rubble and negotiate dense undergrowth to detect bears and ward them off.
The last line of defense is hunters. New digital tools are helping them cull the animals more efficiently.
In Shibetsu, a town in the north, a startup is using high-precision GPS to help multiple teams of hunters, police and local officials share locations and operations on a single map in real time.
Masahiro Osada, a Shibetsu wildlife control official and a hunter, says the system has helped teams avoid friendly fire incidents while cornering bears.
“Safety has improved dramatically,” Osada said. “Before, we had a general idea of where everyone was, but we never knew their exact locations.”
And all movements are recorded, making the system useful for training, he said.
“We can show them exactly how an operation unfolded — where we moved, where the bear appeared, and where shots were fired but the bear managed to escape.”
Yamauchi, the Iwate University professor, warns against becoming overdependent on technology.
Bears have an extremely strong drive for food, he says, and are capable of learning new behaviors. If they find that a certain measure poses them no real threat, they can become habituated to it, ending its effectiveness.
“We need to introduce these technologies carefully while recognizing their limitations,” Yamauchi said. “What’s important is not assuming that simply installing a new technology means the problem has been solved.”
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