SAPPORO--The two friends had just set up a table and chairs in a forest clearing to share a meal of pizza and French fries when an adult brown bear came lumbering out of a thicket to steal their food.

The pair ran for their car in fear of their lives.

The incident, captured on video, went viral on YouTube. People were concerned it was proof that bears have lost their fear of humans.

It turned out that a mother bear, measuring 1.5 meters, was foraging for food for her three cubs nearby. With her sharp sense of smell, she started sniffing the ground as she homed in on the goodies.

The animal knocked over the table with her foreleg and chomped on the pizzas that fell on the ground before scampering away.

Only empty boxes for pizzas and French fries were left around the toppled table.

After coming across the footage on May 11, the city government of Sapporo contacted the two friends who posted it and confirmed the scenes were filmed six days earlier.

ROAMING INTO URBAN ZONES

Prior to the incident, as well as shortly afterward, Sapporo city authorities received a raft of sightings of the pizza-eating mother and her cubs in urban areas. The brown bear family was identified based on their appearance and the traces they left.

They were even spotted near Mount Moiwayama, just a few kilometers from Odori Park in central Sapporo. There were 18 sightings by mid-July.

Hiroshi Matsui, 83, was stunned to see the parent bear and two cubs 10 meters away through a window while relaxing in the living room at his home in Minami Ward on the evening of July 3.

“Something black was moving in the yard,” Matsui recalled.

Another cub was peeking out from a forest behind them. The bears moved closer to his house.

Concerned that they may “break a window” and get in, Matsui dialed emergency services to seek police assistance.

Fighting rising panic, Matsui had no choice but to remain still so as not to alarm the animals. The mother bear, meantime, seemed to be preoccupied with pressing her face to the grass in the yard.

The mother and her cubs ambled off as soon as the police turned up.

But they reappeared the following morning. Startled by Matsui opening the curtains after he woke up, they fled back into the forest.

It was the first time for Matsui to encounter bears in his yard since he moved to the district in 1965.

“I had never imagined bears coming so close,” he said. “I am scared but there is nothing I can do to prevent it.”

Four days later, a hunter shot and killed the mother bear at Sapporo city’s request.

Given their wary nature, brown bears generally hesitated in the past to venture near human settlements.

But lately there have been numerous sightings, including one on Sept. 25 in an urban district.

Sapporo’s residents are increasingly more alert to this change in the behavioral pattern of brown bears.

NO FEAR OF HUMANS

On June 20, emergency services received a report of “a family of four to five bears” around the summit of 531-meter Mount Moiwayama, a popular destination in Minami Ward among sightseers in Sapporo as well as visitors from other parts of Japan and overseas.

A sign warning of “a brown bear sighting near the entrance to a municipal ski slope” was found there the following day.

“A lot of bears have recently been spotted in close proximity to human settlements,” said a 59-year-old man who works for a company in Sapporo. “This is horrific.”

Bear sightings in the suburbs of Sapporo city, with a population of 1.97 million, are growing every year, suggesting the animals are now less fearful of humans. 

In 2021, a brown bear showed up in a residential district of Higashi Ward, which sits on the opposite side of Minami Ward, leaving four individuals with injuries. The area is far from forested mountains. 

Two men were attacked on Mount Sankakuyama about 6 km west of Sapporo Station during a hibernation cave survey in March 2022.

As of the end of July, there had been 113 bear sightings since the start of the year, the most in such a short period for the past 10 years.

Yoshikazu Sato, a professor of ecology at Hokkaido’s Rakuno Gakuen University who is known for his work on “urban bears,” noted that brown bears started showing up in settled areas in Sapporo in the 2000s.

In the 2000s, such sightings became common, even in central districts of urban areas.

In the past, only certain individual bears made repeated appearances. Now, multiple groups are making their presence known across a range of districts in Sapporo, often simultaneously.

This may be due to the fact that they grow up close to adjacent suburbs.

Hokkaido is home to a shrinking population of farmers and hunters due to declining resident numbers and the advancing aging of society. 

That may explain the growing boldness of the animals as they expand their habitat into zones near residential districts.

Sapporo has entered a phase of population decline like other rural parts of Hokkaido and is no longer immune to the bear problem.

“Brown bears are adapting to human society,” Sato warned.