{"id":75796,"date":"2025-12-29T20:00:34","date_gmt":"2025-12-29T11:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2025\/dec\/29\/osaki-japan-town-record-bear-encounters-2025"},"modified":"2025-12-29T20:00:34","modified_gmt":"2025-12-29T11:00:34","slug":"japanese-town-reeling-from-year-of-record-bear-encounters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/?p=75796","title":{"rendered":"Japanese town reeling from year of record bear encounters"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Bears are becoming a growing problem in some of Japan\u2019s urban areas as they are forced to venture further in search of food<\/p>\n<p>It came as no surprise, least of all to the residents of Osaki, that \u201cbear\u201d was selected as Japan\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/mainichi.jp\/english\/articles\/20251219\/p2a\/00m\/0na\/003000c\">kanji character of the year<\/a> earlier this month.<\/p>\n<p>The north-eastern town of 128,000 people is best known for its Naruko Onsen hot springs, autumn foliage and <em>kokeshi<\/em> \u2013 cylindrical dolls carved from a single piece of wood. But this year it has made the headlines as a bear hotspot, as the country reels from a year of record ursine encounters and deaths, with warnings that winter will not bring immediate respite.<\/p>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2025\/dec\/29\/osaki-japan-town-record-bear-encounters-2025\">Continue reading&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Bears are becoming a growing problem in some of Japan\u2019s urban areas as they are forced to venture further in search of foodIt came as no surprise, least of all to the residents of Osaki, that \u201cbear\u201d was selected as Japan\u2019s kanji character of the year e&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5132,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sns_share_botton_hide":"","vkExUnit_sns_title":"","_vk_print_noindex":"","sitemap_hide":"","_veu_custom_css":"","veu_display_promotion_alert":"","vkexunit_cta_each_option":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[41,88,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asia-pacific","category-japan","category-world-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"veu_head_title_object":{"title":"","add_site_title":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5132"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=75796"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75796\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":75797,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75796\/revisions\/75797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=75796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=75796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=75796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}