FY2025 was the worst bear year on record. FY2026 opened 66% above any previous April–June — but spring does not decide the year. Autumn does.
Sightings through 30 June 2026; injuries and deaths through 31 July 2026. Figures are reports to the Ministry of the Environment, not a count of bears.
Each prefecture reddens with the sightings reported that year, FY2022 through FY2025. These are totals, not rates — the large northern prefectures are partly dark because they are large.
FY2025, replayed month by month across the five prefectures that publish their bear reports as open data — Toyama, Niigata, Gunma, Saitama and Hokkaido. When the mountain food failed in autumn, the reports moved downhill all at once.
Deaths by fiscal year since the ministry’s series begins in 2008.
Sightings are up 67% on the same months last year. The casualty figures have not followed — injuries are slightly down, and the death count is small enough that two either way means little.
Two of the causes were structural and had been building for years. Japan's bear population roughly tripled between 2012 and 2025 (est. 15,000 → 54,000), while the hunter base aged out — fewer than 20,000 active bear hunters remained nationwide by 2025, down from over 70,000 in the 1970s.
The third was a trigger, and it belonged to that one year: the 2025 acorn crop failed across Tohoku. When the mountain food supply collapsed in a population-boom year, bears came down looking for apples, persimmons and garbage. They found towns.
The structural causes did not reset in April. The bears and the missing hunters are still there, and FY2026's spring is the highest on record by a wide margin.
But spring is a poor guide to the year. FY2024 was ahead of FY2025 at the end of June — 7,601 sightings against 7,555 — and FY2025 still finished two and a half times larger, because October alone brought 15,998. The record was made in autumn, when the acorns failed. Whether FY2026 beats it depends on this year's mast crop, and that is not yet known.
Population, hunter numbers and the 2025 mast failure: Japan Times, Britannica. All counts: Ministry of the Environment. Full data sources and pipeline: repo.