Japan: Pair of Bears Attack Karate Expert

A pair of Japanese bears chose the wrong target for an attack when they rushed 50-year-old Masato Fukuda, a martial artist trained in karate.

A pair of bears picked the wrong person to mess with Thursday in Japan when they approached a 50-year-old karate practitioner only to be kicked away, police and media said, marking the latest in a spate of attacks in the country in recent months.

Masato Fukuda was lightly injured in his encounter with the bears on Thursday morning in Nayoro city, on the northern island of Hokkaido, police told AFP.

The man was visiting from Japan’s central Aichi region to see a waterfall in Nayoro’s mountainous area when he chanced upon the two brown bears poking their faces out of bushes, the Mainichi newspaper reported.

One of them came towards him — but unfortunately for the animal, Fukuda was experienced in the martial art of karate, according to media reports.

“I thought I should make my move or else I will be killed,” he told a local broadcaster.

The motivation for the bears’ attack is not clear, although it’s certain they got a kick out of it. Fortunately for Masato Fukuda, the attack left him only mildly injured. If he had been more seriously hurt, say, losing a limb, then he would have gone from being a martial artist to a partial artist.

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While this incident happened in Hokkaido, the northernmost major island in the Japanese archipelago, bear attacks are on the increase across the Land of the Rising Sun. As the Japanese population is plateauing, more and more Japanese citizens, especially the younger generations, are moving from outlying areas into the cities. Bears are moving into the less-populated areas now. The Asian brown bear, found in Japan as well as many other places in Eurasia, is essentially the same animal as the North American grizzly, Ursus arctos – the North American grizzly being Ursus arctos horribilis, while the Eurasian brown bear found in Hokkaido is Ursus arctos arctos.

Bear attacks are up at present due to a dry summer in 2023, which reduced forage for the beasts.

There were a record 193 bear attacks in Japan last year, six of them fatal, marking the highest number since counting began in 2006.

In November, a bear attack was suspected after a college student was found dead on a mountain in northern Japan. Last May, police said at the time that they believed the man was mauled and decapitated by a brown bear after a human head was found in the northern part of the island.

Experts told CBS News that there are primarily two reasons for the surge in attacks. First, a dry summer left fewer acorns and beech nuts — their main food — so hunger has made them bold. Second, as Japan’s population shrinks, humans are leaving rural areas, and bears are moving in.

It’s never a good thing when large predators start associating people with food; in fact, it’s unbearable. But humans make easy prey, once the animal’s inbred caution around people is overcome; we are soft and squishy by large mammal standards, with no sharp teeth or claws and no thick fur to protect us.

We can hope that Mr. Fukuda takes the lessons learned from the bear attack back to his karate instructor; this is a new threat that we feel certain the instructors will want to be sensei-tive to.

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