![\"Infographic](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/00234bf9-614.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\nA bear appears to have killed a man picking mushrooms in a Japanese forest, police have said, the latest in a spate of suspected confrontations that could set a record if confirmed.<\/p>\n
More and more wild bears have been spotted in Japan in recent years, even in residential areas, due to factors including a declining human population and climate change.<\/p>\n
“A man in his 70s who went missing after going into the woods to harvest mushrooms was found dead,” a local police officer in the northern region of Iwate said.<\/p>\n
“We suspect he was attacked by a bear based on scratch marks,” he said.<\/p>\n
The official death toll due to bear attacks has risen to six for the fiscal year starting April 2025, matching a record high seen in 2023, according to the environment ministry.<\/p>\n
But in the last week there have been three fatal suspected attacks, which would push fatalities to an annual record if the cause of death is confirmed as a bear.<\/p>\n
As well as the man in his 70s, police found a dead man apparently attacked by a bear in another part of Iwate on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
While in the central prefecture of Nagano, the body of a 78-year-old man with multiple claw marks was found on Saturday.<\/p>\n
While police highly suspect they died in bear attacks, the cause of death is still under investigation.<\/p>\n
Between April and September 103 people nationwide suffered injuries caused by bears, according to the environment ministry.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, an agitated bear roamed the aisles of a supermarket in Gunma, north of Tokyo, injuring two men and frightening shoppers.<\/p>\n
The store is close to mountainous areas, but has never had bears come near before, Hiroshi Horikawa, a management planning official at the grocery store chain, said.<\/p>\n
A Spanish tourist on Sunday was attacked by a bear at a bus stop in scenic Shirakawa-go village in central Japan.<\/p>\n
Among the latest confirmed fatalities was a woman in her 70s who died last week while picking mushrooms in northern Miyagi region with three friends, one of whom is missing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A bear appears to have killed a man picking mushrooms in a Japanese forest, police have said, the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":71222,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[61,60,82,263],"class_list":["post-71221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71221\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/71222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}