Jay Allen

That's also a record.

And the number of sightings have roughly doubled in two years.

So if we ask why that's happening, the causes are generally human made.

I know a lot of people probably know already that Japan is experiencing depopulation.

but that population is even more marked in rural areas like Fukushima, for example, because a lot more young people these days are seeking economic opportunity in the larger cities like Tokyo and Osaka.

There's a lot more abandoned land, and that basically encourages the bears to give them more room to roam, so they go up more to the forest edge a lot.

There's far fewer hunters than there used to be as the

old population of hunters dies out, a new generation isn't replacing them.

And there's some environmental factors as well.

So poor nut harvests have been linked to climate change and those push hungry bears further and further into town.

There was an incident last year in the Occupy Prefecture where a bear actually holed up in a department store for about 48 hours or so before they managed to get it out.

There can be, yes.

So as a lot of people probably know, Japan has some of the strictest gun laws on Earth.

And up until recently, hundreds were even just banned from firing in built up areas without a police sign off.

Japan changed that law.

So there is a new emergency

emergency shooting law that took effect last September.

Local governments can't authorize hunters to shoot a bear on the spot.

But like I said, that happened in Akita in the

the super the department store supermarket occupation uh they tried to get the bear out through peaceful means and they ended up shooting and killing it and then the local government was flooded with over 100 complaints uh the governor of occupant prefecture actually got so upset over the complaints that he threatened to send bears to people's houses if they kept calling my goodness