This just in: Bears can be dangerous. Not just here in the United States, mind you, much less just here in Alaska, where we have some of the biggest bears presently extant on the planet. No, bears can be dangerous in plenty of other places, including some places many Americans aren't accustomed to associating with bears.
Like, say, Japan. And yet, in a recent incident on Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan's home islands, that's what a couple of motorists found out, when a mother bear attacked their car.
Yes, that's right — she attacked their car. Watch:
Note that this is one determined mama bear. First she starts to flee, moving what appears to be a lone cub of the roadway. Then she turns, attacks the car, starts to turn away, then attacks again. You can hear her teeth on the metal of the car's hood, screeching and scratching. And, yeah, this angry mother did some damage.Hokkaido Police said the vehicle was traveling in the town of Bifuka on Tuesday when the driver stopped for a large brown bear and its cub crossing the road.
The video shows both bears initially flee from the vehicle, but the mother bear then charges the car as it stops and jumps onto the hood, biting and clawing.
The bear backs away and repeatedly rams into the front of the car before fleeing with the cub.
Police said the bruin's attack left dents, scratch marks and a hole in the vehicle's hood.
Consider the bite force that must have taken, to put a hole in the sheet-metal hood of an automobile.
Most bears in Japan are the Japanese Black Bear (Ursus thibetanus japonicus), a subspecies of the Asian Black Bear, but those bears live only on the islands of Honshu and Shikoku. This bear, while it doesn't appear to be a particularly outsized example, is referred to in the story as a brown bear, and on Hokkaido, that would necessarily be the case, as the bears on that island are Ussuri Brown Bears (Ursus arctos lasiotus), a subspecies of the same brown bears that roam from western Europe to the New World, including our famous Alaskan browns and grizzlies. Hokkaido is, in a sense, Japan's Alaska, and the flora and fauna of that island kind of reflects that.
These Ussuri brown bears can be sizable, running up to over 400 pounds. Also, a healthy adult in Hokkaido has no enemies or predators other than, possibly, another bear. And, yes, these bears have killed people. In mainland Asia, they are sometimes preyed on by tigers, but in Japan the greatest danger they face is from cars. This mama bear, as we see, isn't afraid of cars.
Right now, in Japan and right here in the United States, bears are engaged in that last-minute search for calories before they den up for the winter. They are eating anything and everything they can, fattening up for hibernation, and they can be more dangerous than usual to approach, even unwittingly. In this case, this Hokkaido bear was defending her cub, but she would likely have been just as aggressive towards a human hiker who disturbed her on, say, a carcass she had claimed. And in Japan there's the added complication: No Second Amendment, meaning that arming yourself against bear attack is very nearly impossible.
So, be careful in bear country. Even in Japan.