Bear crisis in Japan: without the wolf, the next record summer looms

On 24 June 2026, the Japanese supermarket chain Family Mart placed a “Monster Wolf” directly in front of one of its branches for the first time, in Gunma Prefecture.

The battery-powered robot wolf, with flashing red eyes and dozens of warning sounds, is intended to keep bears away from the branch during a seven-month trial run. It is the latest symptom of a crisis that shows what has been missing since Japan wiped out its wolves over a century ago.

Record year for bear attacks

The figures from the current 2025/2026 bear year are historic. According to the Japanese Ministry of the Environment, around 50’776 bear sightings were registered nationwide, more than double the previous peak of 24’348 in 2023. Bears killed 13 people, more than twice as many as in the previous record year, and injured over 200 others. Animals were spotted on airport runways, golf courses, in supermarkets and onsen baths. The authorities responded with a record kill quota: 14’601 bears were caught and killed in 2025, almost three times as many as the previous year. Japan even temporarily deployed the military for this.

The robot wolf as a stopgap

The company Ohta Seiki in the north of Hokkaido, manufacturer of the «Monster Wolf» robots, can no longer keep up with production. In the first few months of the current year alone, around 50 orders came in, more than usually in an entire year. Customers have to wait two to three months for their device. «We make them by hand and can no longer keep up with production,» said company boss Yuji Ohta. The battery-powered devices, equipped with solar panels, motion sensors and more than 50 different warning sounds, cost from around 4’000 US dollars. Originally developed in 2016 against red deer and wild boars, they are now regarded as one of the few effective measures against the growing presence of bears in populated areas.

Reintroduction as a counter-model

While supermarkets rely on robot wolves, the Japan Wolf Association (JWA), founded in 1993, has for decades pursued a different approach: the reintroduction of real wolves. The organisation proposes releasing wolves from China on the main islands of Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu, as well as more robust Siberian animals in northern Hokkaido, initially in small test groups in sparsely populated regions. The success of the reintroduction of the Japanese crested ibis serves as a model. A leading representative of the JWA, the entrepreneur Kunihiko Otsuki, considers the mountainous hinterland of Hokkaido to be the most suitable starting point.

The resistance is considerable. JWA surveys from 2016 do show a decline in opposition from 44 to 11 percent, but a large part of the population remains simply indifferent. Right-wing nationalist groups have in the past loudly protested against the «import of foreign wolves», and the government as well as other nature conservation organisations point to the advanced industrialisation and the proximity of humans and potential wolf territory.

The parallel to Switzerland

The Japanese case is an object lesson with European resonance. Switzerland too has demonstrated that the return of the wolf regenerates forests and regulates ungulate populations in a natural way, for example in the case of the Calanda pack, where browsing damage to young trees demonstrably declined (see our dossier «Wolf in Switzerland: facts, politics and the limits of hunting» as well as the article «No forest without the wolf: what predators mean for Switzerland»). The decisive difference: while Japan is responding with robots and record kill quotas to a gap left by the missing apex predator, the wolf has long since returned to Switzerland and is nevertheless being systematically combated, as our article «How Berlin and Bern give the wolf up for killing» shows.

Japan's robot wolves are a technical stopgap for an ecological function that a real predator would fulfil free of charge. Hobby hunting Hobby hunting, which according to the JWA would have to take over the missing regulation, is structurally incapable of doing so, not least because in Japan's depopulated rural regions ever fewer people practise it. What Japan is currently learning at the cost of billions in damage and record bear casualties, Switzerland demonstrated long ago with the Calanda pack: an apex predator regulates more effectively and more cheaply than kills and technology ever could — if you let it.