roamed the streets of a Japanese city for four days<\/a>, forcing mass school closures, has been caught, capping a search involving dozens of hunters and police.<\/p>\nTerrified families in the city of Utsunomiya, north of Tokyo, peered through windows as a search mission that included helicopters tried to track down the animal following multiple sightings, including in a shopping arcade, at a university and at a wholesale market.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday (local time) dozens of police officers, hunters and city officials surrounded a private home where the bear was spotted, an AFP photographer witnessed.<\/p>\n
After a successful tranquiliser shot, they captured the animal.<\/p>\n
AFP images showed the sedated bear loaded onto a truck.<\/p>\n
![\"Hunters](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/4JN9GYP_AFP__20260609__B6FH4WB__v1__HighRes__JapanAnimalBear_jpg.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
\nHunters stand next to a truck carrying a sedated wild bear after it was captured in Utsunomiya, north of Tokyo, on June 9, 2026.
\nPhoto: AFP \/ Yuichi Yamazaki\n<\/p>\n
Issei Okabe, a 37-year-old house painter who lives in an apartment next to the house where the bear was caught, told AFP he was “so relieved”.<\/p>\n
“My kid goes to the primary school nearby… and news reports said a bear appeared around there,” he said.<\/p>\n
“Then I watched the news, and our house was shown (in the footage)… I was so surprised.<\/p>\n
“This is the first time I heard of a wild bear in Utsunomiya.”<\/p>\n
The bear sightings had forced the closure of all 94 public primary and middle schools in the city on Monday and Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Public broadcaster NHK and other major media reported the bear’s capture as breaking news.<\/p>\n
The Shimotsuke Shimbun daily, based in Utsunomiya, said the first and second tranquiliser shots missed the target but a third successfully hit the animal.<\/p>\n
A city official told AFP on Monday it was not clear whether there was one bear or more roaming the city.<\/p>\n
Separately, an “extremely intelligent” bear that injured four people in Fukushima in northern Japan has remained at large after apparently unlatching a window while evading capture, NHK reported.<\/p>\n
A record 13 people were killed by bears in Japan last year, and there has been a jump in sightings as the animals emerge hungry from hibernation.<\/p>\n
Bears are thriving thanks in part to an abundance of food, including acorns, deer and boars, under the influence of a warming climate, experts say.<\/p>\n
-AFP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The bear after being sedated and captured in Utsunomiya City, Tochigi Prefecture. Photo: AFP \/ Jiji Press \/…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":471205,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[48,47,111,43,139,69,49,46,44,45,147,406],"class_list":["post-471204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-audio","tag-current-affairs","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-podcasts","tag-public-radio","tag-radio-new-zealand","tag-rnz","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=471204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471204\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/471205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=471204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=471204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=471204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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<\/p>\n