When I lived in North Vancouver with three school-age children, I sometimes was quietly told to urge them to take a longer walk to school, rather than the path through the woods, because a bear had come down from the mountain with her two cubs.

Rangers would then capture the bears with a dart gun and take them back to the mountain. No hysterical fuss at all. In rural communities where there is local forest in America and Canada, bear sightings are common, as are warnings about leaving raw garbage, fallen fruit from trees and other enticements for bears to enter human life.

When I first came to Japan in 1962, I was most impressed that Japan, a modern, industrial country, and an independent island nation, had two species of bears. To me it meant that the Japanese had taken care of their forests and rivers.

For the past 24 years of living in Kurohime, Nagano Prefecture, I have been saddened and often dismayed at the destruction of nature and the results this destruction is having ... the trapping and killing of bears, for example.

Bears are the epic animal of Japan's forest environment. Wild bears in natural forests are a huge asset. We must really understand why they come out of the forests. Our community has been greatly troubled this year because one man died from a bear attack.

Until the Showa Era (1926-1989), there were hundreds of rivers and thousands of tributaries, from Hokkaido to northern Kyushu, that had anadromous salmon or char runs (not to mention ayu sweetfish). These rivers have all been dammed, yet our Nagano prefectural governor still has to fight to stop the building of another 13 dams.

Governor Yasuo Tanaka himself told me that there were still plans for thousands of sabo dams to further block off small mountain tributaries in Nagano. It's crazy!

Some scientists have tried to tell me that Japanese bears didn't feed on these fish. Oh, yeah? I know that the bears in our woods splash around chasing after little freshwater crabs, and that until the dams on the Shinanogawa and Chikumagawa rivers came, local folk could snag a salmon with a sickle from the little local streams.

Natural, mixed woods have been changed to conifer plantations. That didn't just happen after the Pacific War, it's still going on today, and is being financed by the government.

Raw garbage is carelessly dumped all over the countryside, and people plant sweet corn year after year after year in the same places. Our bears love sweet corn and ... surprise! Every year they come to raid.

If an electric fence dissuades them from one place, they can easily find another, and that probably is somebody's backyard.

Japan has pathetically few national park rangers, and they are qualified as bureaucrats, not trained to deal with wildlife.

Another problem is the lack of funds for bear research. On top of that, if researchers capture and radio collar a bear to track its movements, there is a great likelihood that hunters with the same equipment will track the bear to its den, kill it, and then discard or destroy the expensive collar and ruin the research. Our local hunting association asks us not to radio collar bears because they know this will happen.

The bear encounters are commonly blamed this year on unusual weather causing a poor crop of acorns, and also from an increased range of forest damaging insects due to global warming, or from acorns being dropped by typhoon winds, or from salt damage as sea spray is blown far inland. Surely these factors do cause a lack of natural food for bears, but bears are omnivorous. Their diet can be greatly varied, but they learn what to forage from their mothers. If the mother eats garbage and sweet corn, so will the offspring. Neglect, careless human habits and the dwindling numbers of forest and farm workers have brought about a disgraceful degradation of our natural habitat.

We want to rebuild our streams and water systems to allow more wild fish to migrate. We should change conifer plantations to mixed forest, and return to wise husbandry of both public and private woodlands, not only for bears, but for all wildlife, for water retention, prevention of landslides, for carbon uptake, for quality timber, for the many valuable non-timber forest products such as honey, mushrooms, wild vegetables and so on. We should have adequate funds and people to deal with bears and other wildlife problems.

Or is the answer simply to kill the bears? If you think whaling causes an international outcry, believe me, slaughtering bears just because they come into contact with humans will raise a far more emotional ruckus.

Wake up Japan. Be responsible for your wildlife and nature!

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C.W. Nicol, a novelist, is engaged in natural preservation activities with the establishment of the Afan Woodland Trust. He contributed this comment to The Asahi Shimbun.(IHT/Asahi: November 5,2004)