A Tokyo suburb has announced an emergency spending plan to buy 700 anti-bear sprays for schools and community organizations, the local government said Wednesday, as the animals increasingly encroach into built-up areas around Japan.<\/p>\n
Japan saw a record 13 people killed by bears last fiscal year, according to the environment ministry, and five more fatalities and 20 people injured between April 1 and May 30 this year.<\/p>\n
Hachioji is on the outskirts of the capital region and at weekends draws Tokyoites to its popular hiking trails into the nearby forested mountains.<\/p>\n
Eleven sightings or signs of bears have been reported there since April, with a motion-activated camera capturing footage of a black bear around a residence on April 29, broadcaster NHK reported.<\/p>\n
The city will spend \u00a515 million ($93,000) on sprays, movable electric fences and devices that make high-pitched sounds, said local government spokesman Ryosuke Sato.<\/p>\n
It is also planning to draft an action plan to call in hunters and take other measures in case bears appear in local neighborhoods.<\/p>\n
\u201cBy closely working with police and hunters, we are drafting a manual on how to deal with bears should they come to our streets,\u201d Sato added.<\/p>\n
In the latest fiscal year ending in March, bear sightings nationwide topped 50,000, more than double the previous record set two years earlier, according to official data.<\/p>\n
In recent months there has been a jump in sightings after the bears emerged from hibernation, as well as incidents of bears entering urban areas.<\/p>\n
Earlier this month all schools closed in Utsunomiya,\u00a0Tochigi Prefecture, after a bear roamed the city and evaded dozens of police officers and hunters for four days before being captured.<\/p>\n
Before that another bear described as \u201cextremely intelligent\u201d \u2014 it opened a window and turned on a tap \u2014 attacked four people at two factories in Fukushima and remained at large for days.<\/p>\n
National and regional governments are trying to clear bushes along riverbanks and areas between neighborhoods and mountains, including in Hachioji, to prevent bears from coming to urban areas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Tokyo suburb has announced an emergency spending plan to buy 700 anti-bear sprays for schools and community…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":762906,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[1313,64,63,4632,363944,135,4211,128,11804,338],"class_list":["post-762905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-animals","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-bears","tag-hachioji","tag-local-government","tag-schools","tag-science","tag-tokyo","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/762905","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=762905"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/762905\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/762906"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=762905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=762905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=762905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}