Mannequins, Bears, and Empty Villages: Prof. Daniel Aldrich Explores What Japan’s Bear Attacks Signal About the Future of Aging Societies
“[Japan] is having these problems of depopulation, low birth rates, and human-wildlife interaction before other developed nations,” says Prof. Aldrich, “but it will happen to us, too.”
“There are fewer vehicles on the roads, fewer hunters in the woods, fewer farmers in the fields,” says Prof. Daniel Aldrich, describing the situation in many rural areas of Japan where, in some villages, residents have taken to replacing missing neighbors with mannequins and puppets to combat loneliness. “Japanese young people don’t want to live out there,” he says. “They call these places 𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘬𝘢 𝘯𝘰 𝘯𝘢𝘬𝘢—basically ‘bum-f–k nowhere.’” Young people leave for Tokyo and don’t come back.
Prof. Aldrich, whose research focuses on how dense, closely-knit populations can boost a community’s resilience in times of disaster, believes that Japan’s staggering demographic shift is contributing to the country’s bear crisis.
Without enough young adults living and having children in rural areas, many towns are declining in population, and as they do, the buffer between human civilization and wilderness is collapsing. In 2025, moon bears killed 13 people and injured 230 others, many of them in their own yards, in broad daylight. One bear ransacked a supermarket near Tokyo. Another dragged a man into the forest near a hot spring.
The Japanese military was deployed. Hunters culled nearly 10,000 bears. Farmers turned to electric fences, bear spray, and animatronic scarecrow wolves with laser eyes and screaming speakers. And yet the attacks keep coming. Bears aren’t invading; they’re simply filling a vacuum.
Japan is the canary in the coal mine for aging, depopulating societies worldwide. “It’s having these problems of depopulation, low birth rates, and human-wildlife interaction before other developed nations,” says Prof. Aldrich, “but it will happen to us, too.”