Four people were injured this Tuesday in a series of bear attacks in the city of Fukushima, in northeastern Japan, and had to be taken to the hospital, according to information from the authorities collected by local media. Authorities suspect that the bear remains in the area, and classes have been canceled in the neighborhood schools, where bear sightings have been recorded since the day before the incident. Tuesday’s events come at a time when the Asian country is on alert due to the increasing number of such attacks.
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The first incident took place early in the morning at a steel mill in the town, where two people reported being bitten by a bear. After the attack, the animal moved to a residential area, where it attacked a woman in a house and a man in a store, detailed the Japanese news agency Kyodo.
At the end of March, Japanese authorities approved a five-year plan to address the increasingly frequent bear attacks on humans, after recording a record 13 deaths in more than 230 attacks during the 2025 fiscal year (which ended in March 2026). This strategy includes capturing and killing about 10,000 bears across the country during the new fiscal year, which will end in March 2027.
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Last year, authorities captured 14,720 of these animals, according to figures from the Ministry of the Environment cited by the Japanese press, of which 14,601 were euthanized. So far in 2026, there have already been three deaths from bear attacks in Japan: two in Iwate Prefecture (northeast), and one in Yamagata Prefecture (northwest), according to official data.
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