Japan’s hunters refuse meagre pay to face deadly bears: ‘like fighting a US commando’
- With bear sightings and attacks on the rise in Japan’s northern countryside, hunters demand fairer compensation to battle the surging threat
With a record 219 bear attacks, including six fatalities, over the past year, rural communities are desperate for help – but hunters say the dangerous job simply isn’t worth the meagre pay.
The alarming uptick in bear sightings and related incidents has local officials scrambling for solutions.
Government data shows more than 3,000 bear encounters reported just in April and May, about 500 more than usual. Since April 1, the animals have attacked 37 people across 16 prefectures, killing two.
In Naie, population 4,800, bears now menace the outskirts of the mountain town multiple times a year as ageing hunters struggle to keep up.
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The town’s task force made a desperate plea to the local Hokkaido Hunters’ Association, requesting the group’s 43 registered members conduct a cull. But the offer on the table was woefully inadequate – just 10,300 yen (US$64) for an eight-hour workday.
The hunters swiftly and categorically declined the proposal.
Tatsuhito Yamagishi, the association’s 72-year-old head, told the Asahi newspaper that the offered compensation was wholly insufficient.
“It is not worth the effort because confronting a bear will put our lives on the line,” he said, adding that Naie underestimated the immense challenges facing the hunters in its efforts to keep people safe.
“Forests are their turf and they can see us hunters even when we cannot see them. I know many hunters who were mauled in the face in a flash,” Yamagishi said, describing bears as “wise”.
He concluded with a vivid analogy: “Fighting a brown bear is like fighting a US military commando in a forest.”
Fighting a brown bear is like fighting a US military commando in a forest
Haruo Ikegami, the regional head of the hunters’ organisation, backed Yamagishi’s position.
“This is not a job that just anyone can do,” he told This Week in Asia. “A hunter needs to profile the bear before even setting out and then hunt the bear. These are not easy skills to learn.”
“And I’m retired so I have more time, but a lot of our members have jobs so it would be very difficult for them to simply stop working to hunt for a day,” he said. “And working in the mountains and forest is tiring work so it would be hard to do eight hours.”
Ikegami also stated that the proposed compensation of 10,300 yen per day was insufficient, noting that hunters previously “got paid 20,000 yen a day, but there were fewer bears back then and so we had fewer members”.
He suggested that 35,000 yen would be a more appropriate figure for a full day of bear hunting, and recommended breaking the work into shorter blocks of time when bears are most active.
“Hunting bears is dangerous because they can smell and hear you a long time before you can see them,” he said, emphasising the inherent dangers involved. “Right now, there are a lot more bears than hunters.”
Other hunters in the region have also rejected inadequate pay offers, with one group in Shimamaki village claiming 10 million yen for two months of work in 2018. Officials initially refused to foot the bill, the Asahi reported, but eventually agreed to 26,900 yen per day after prolonged negotiations.
A Naie town official indicated that negotiations with the hunters were ongoing, and the locality was currently relying on police and town officials to respond to bear sightings.
Warnings are also being posted on the community website and on the Line instant messaging system.
