I stepped off the bus from Tokyo and into a dense fog. The town of Kazuno, in Japan’s rural Akita prefecture, looked nearly abandoned. I’d arrived expecting the pastoral whimsy of a Miyazaki film. Instead, I seemed to have wandered into a level of Silent Hill.
I crisscrossed the street, peering into mostly vacant shop windows, many of them plastered with flyers warning locals about bears. I saw more signs of bear safety when two elementary-aged girls passed me. Small golden bells hung from their backpacks, and long after the little girls disappeared into the fog ahead, I could hear the bells tinkling in the distance. Then, a trio of military transport trucks sped through the mist.
Kazuno, population 28,000, is a farming community in the far north of Japan’s main island, Honshu. The town is essentially one long road, wedged between the Ōu Mountains, Japan’s longest range. Rice paddies stretch for a half-mile east and west of town before the land rises into the peaks, which are carpeted by dense forests of rich, green cedar trees, interspersed with beech.
Kazuno is also ground-zero for Japan’s increasingly deadly conflict with wild bears. According to the country’s environmental ministry, from April until December, 2025, 13 people were killed by bears, and 230 were injured in separate attacks. Fifty-eight of those attacks occurred in Akita, prompting the government to take swift action. I arrived in Kazuno in mid-November, shortly after the Japanese government deployed the military there and in other towns to address the bear crisis.
