8 October 2025. Numata City, Gunma Prefecture, a couple of hours north of Tokyo by car. Late morning, a supermarket doing completely ordinary supermarket business.
A black bear, roughly 1.4 metres nose to tail, crosses the car park and walks in through the automatic doors like a customer who already knows where the seafood counter is. It works through the fish and sushi case. In the produce aisle it puts a paw down in the middle of the avocados.
Two shoppers, 69 and 76, are hurt before staff and police clear the building and corner the animal. Somebody's phone is already filming, because somebody's phone is always already filming, and by that evening a bear shopping for sushi is on the news in three countries that do not have bears in their supermarkets.
Zoom out and the avocados stop being funny. Japan's fiscal year 2025, which ran to March 2026, closed with a record 238 people killed or injured by bears nationwide and 13 deaths — both the highest figures ever recorded, comfortably clearing the previous record of 219 injured and six dead set only two years earlier, in fiscal 2023. Sightings reported between April and October 2025 alone ran to roughly 36,814, nearly double the same stretch the year before. The Numata supermarket was one clip among hundreds that autumn. It just happened to be the one with the avocados in it.
The proximate cause is almost boringly simple: a poor acorn harvest in the mountains sends hungry bears down toward towns to fatten up before hibernation, and bad acorn years have always done this. What they have not always done is put a bear inside a supermarket's fish case. For that, look past the trees.
Look instead at the people who used to stand between the forest and the fish counter. Japan's hunting licence holders numbered over 500,000 in the 1970s; today the figure sits at roughly 200,000, and something close to six in ten of them are past 60. Meanwhile the black bear population itself has done the opposite, climbing from an estimated 15,000 animals in 2012 to more than 40,000 today, the quiet payoff of decades of conservation law working exactly as designed. Put those two lines on the same chart and they cross in the worst possible direction: more bears, arriving into a countryside with fewer people left who are both willing and licensed to stop one. The abandoned farms and orchards ringing depopulated villages, no longer cleared or worked, have grown back into exactly the kind of low cover a bear can use to walk to within sight of a supermarket sign without a human noticing.
The response has been part robot, part reservist. In Hokkaido, a company called Ohta Seiki builds the "Super Monster Wolf" — a fibreglass animatronic head with flashing red eyes, motion sensors, and a library of more than fifty sounds, from wolf howls to human shouting, broadcast loud enough to carry a kilometre. It has been on the market since 2016 as a novelty for farmers guarding crops from deer and boar. In 2026 the company has already logged around fifty orders, more than it would normally sell in an entire year, and is telling customers to expect a two- to three-month wait. Elsewhere, prefectures have asked the Self-Defense Forces to help transport and corner animals near towns, and in November 2025 the government revised its national bear countermeasures, adding subsidies aimed at making hunting bears something closer to paid work rather than an unpaid favour performed by volunteers in their seventies.
None of this is new mountain lore. Signs reading 熊出没注意 — bear sighted, take care — have stood at trailheads for as long as anyone can remember, a piece of scenery so familiar hikers stop reading it after the first one. The unsettling part of 2025 was watching that sign migrate off the mountain path and onto the road into an actual neighbourhood, because the mountain had, in a very literal sense, moved.
Everyone who shared the Numata clip told it as a story about a wild animal getting bold enough to walk into a shop. It is closer to the reverse. Bears did not learn to invade towns; the towns emptied out from underneath the arrangement that used to keep the two apart. Japan's rural population is ageing and shrinking on the same graph as its hunters, at exactly the moment its bear population was quietly recovering — and the overgrown, unfarmed, unpatrolled land in between is not a wilderness closing in on civilisation. It is a vacancy, and the bears are simply the first tenants to notice nobody is renewing the lease.
- Japan's fiscal 2025 (ending March 2026) closed with a record 238 people killed or injured by bears nationwide, including 13 deaths — both all-time highs, well past the previous record of 219 injured and six dead set in fiscal 2023. Sightings reported nationwide between April and October 2025 alone ran to roughly 36,814, nearly double the same period the year before.
- Japan's hunting licence holders have fallen from more than 500,000 in the 1970s to roughly 200,000 today, with an estimated six in ten now over the age of 60 — over the same span, the black bear population is estimated to have grown from around 15,000 animals in 2012 to more than 40,000 today.
- Hokkaido's Ohta Seiki has sold its animatronic "Super Monster Wolf" — flashing eyes, motion sensors, more than fifty sounds audible up to a kilometre away — since 2016. In 2026 alone the company has logged around fifty orders, more than a typical full year, and is asking buyers to wait two to three months.