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The story
On the evening of October 3rd in Sunagawa, Hokkaido, a teenage girl riding her bicycle home encountered a bear about 1.5 meters long at a distance of just 10 meters. The bear was growling, but instead of running away, the girl simply rode past it on her bicycle and made it home unharmed. Reactions on a 5ch thread were split over whether her response was actually the right call, the recent surge in bear sightings across Hokkaido, and comparisons to past fatal bear attacks.
On the evening of October 3rd in Sunagawa, Hokkaido, a teenage girl riding her bicycle home encountered a growling bear. The girl was not injured.
On the evening of October 3rd in Sunagawa, Hokkaido, a teenage girl riding her bicycle home encountered a growling bear. The girl was not injured.
The bear was spotted on a municipal road in the Yakiyama area of Sunagawa. At around 6:10 p.m. on the 3rd, the girl, riding her bicycle home, noticed a bear about 1.5 meters long in the grass on the west side of the road.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Then don't come down the mountain at all — just stay on the summit.
You can't hit 40 km/h on a mamachari (a basic Japanese city bike) anyway — if she'd panicked and tried to run, she probably would've gotten eaten.
Yeah, the hood had holes punched clean through it by its claws. Face one head-on and those claws can rip right across your face — no wonder people end up with gouged-out faces.
Why did they even bother stopping in the first place? I was watching thinking, just drive off without stopping.
Looked it up and found it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPxHY60I5os
Terrifying.
Bear fur is coarse and stiff, so it's not really great pelt material.
Apparently there are now twice as many brown bears as there were before Japanese settlers arrived. The Ainu actively hunted bears, but then a Socialist Party governor put a stop to the spring bear culls.
Meanwhile I'm over here crying from hunger.
True. Maybe this encounter was just a 'scouting trip' for the bear.
(Quoting the famous Gundam line) 'You were a good friend… but your father was wrong.'
Wasn't the newspaper delivery worker who got killed attacked right in the middle of a residential area, in some bushes?
Exactly.
I heard it's tourists who see a red fox and go 'aww, cute,' while Hokkaido locals either run or go into fight mode.
It's 'What?!' then '…you.'
Get the meme order right.
There's something way less 'fine' than a black bear up there lol
Thought it might be near Asahikawa, but it was Sunagawa. Those things come running right along the riverbanks 🐻
Though around here it's mostly just muntjac deer and wild boar.
Haven't you seen the video of the kei truck (mini-truck) that got attacked while just trying to drive past?
Saw that in Hyakushou Kizoku (a manga about farm life) lol. It said a kei truck would actually lose in a fight against a brown bear.
So if you're young, you can actually outrun one, is that it?
Someone's gonna start lecturing about how SDF rifles don't have enough firepower for that, so just don't.
Shut it already!!
Just wipe them all out from the sky with this!
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
In Hokkaido, sightings and emergences of brown bears have been trending upward in recent years, and encounters near residential areas are no longer unusual. The “newspaper delivery worker attacked in a residential neighborhood” and “police confiscating a hunter’s rifle” mentioned in the thread both reference real incidents previously reported in Hokkaido, illustrating how bear countermeasures there are tangled up with issues of hunting-association manpower, budgets, and permitting.
Where opinions in the thread diverged was over how to judge simply riding past the bear instead of fleeing. Some saw calmly passing by without running as “level-headed,” while others argued that not getting attacked was “just luck, nothing more.” In reality, bears react differently depending on the individual animal and the situation, so there’s no single correct response to an encounter. Turning and running, standing still, or slowly backing away are all recommended depending on circumstances — it’s easy to mistakenly treat this particular response as the universal right answer, but that’s not actually the case.
*This article is compiled as an excerpt/summary from the 5ch (News Express+) thread “[Hokkaido] Teen girl riding bicycle home comes face to face with a growling bear just 10 meters away… rides straight past on her bike and makes it home safe.”
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