Introduction
It was when I was four or five that my father, a woodsman, first told me the story of the man-eating bear of Sankebetsu. It was so scary that I could not get up to go to the bathroom. Later on I learned more about the incident. My paternal grandfather (also a woodsman), in particular, told me all about it: he was well-versed in the subject from his time as a student in the agricultural college at Tōhoku Imperial University. Innocent women and children killed and devoured; an unborn baby ripped from its mother’s womb; a cruel attack during the wake for previous victims; the bear, never tiring, rampaging through pioneer house after pioneer house. The Sankebetsu Incident is a tragedy with no precedent. It remains the deadliest bear attack in history.
My interest in bears dates back to my childhood: I saw many trained bears and retained that interest as I grew up. But it was not until August of 1938 that I really learned what bears were capable of. I was in my fifth year of fishing school, which I spent doing hands-on training in the bay of Murakami on the island of Paramushir, part of the Kuril Islands. I went there to look for salmon and trout; my predecessor there had been slaughtered by a giant bear. Since that time, when by a hair I avoided a similar fate, my interest in “the bear” has only deepened.
In 1941, when I followed in the footsteps of my father and grandfather and became a woodsman myself, I thought to investigate what really happened in the Sankebetsu Incident. This was because a disaster of such magnitude seemed to have been buried and faded away into history, with no documentation left behind to speak to the truth. In the extensive reporting done by newspapers all over Hokkaidō there are many errors: there are discrepancies in the dates, the number of, names, and ages of the victims. I considered such an investigation to be part of my job. Perhaps a more correct record could heal the souls of the victims, ease the bereaved families, and be of scholarly use.
But with nothing besides a collection of half-incorrect newspapers to tell me what really happened, I spent the better part of twenty years with nary a lead on the truth. In the spring of 1961, I received orders to transfer from my Imperial Household Agency Forest office in the town of Horokanai to the local office in Kotanbetsu. This office, as fate would have it, had jurisdiction over the area in which the attack had occurred. But as lucky as that was, I found later that all told, there were as many as thirty living witnesses to this event, despite it having happened forty-six years ago. Concentrated in northwest Hokkaidō, these witnesses included people who had grown up hearing about the attack, families of the victims, members of the retaliatory parties, and, most miraculously, four survivors of the bear’s attacks. It was thanks to their valuable testimonies that I was able to publish my first work, The Tomamae Bear Incident: The Greatest Tragedy in the History of Animal Attacks, fifty years after the incident.
And this year is the eightieth anniversary of the disaster. That I have been able to publish this hefty little work in a year of such significance is of great delight to me, but time waits for no man, and those who gave their all in cooperation with this historical record now pass one after the other into the next life. Now only two remain.
For the pioneers who had the misfortune to become ensnared in this great tragedy, things happened in quick succession beginning in 1910. From the neighboring villages: Ōtodo and Onishika, and Kabe, northeast of the frontier, came more than forty people, in fifteen dwellings, to rapidly throw open the region for use as farmland.
The Sankebetsu frontier was thrown wide open by settlers from neighboring villages from the northeast–Ōtodo and Onishika, and Kabe. All told, more than forty people came, establishing fifteen houses and wide farming fields. Among them were those who had cast aside both their previous homes and their doubts of their families and placed their hopes, to their great pity, in this new frontier.
In the course of this book I have abbreviated place names, but in more detail the complete address at the time was: Teshio Province, Tomamae County, Tomamae Village, Greater Rikibiru Village, Sankebetsu Imperial Field No. 6, New Frontier Area, Rokusensawa. Today, it is now part of Sankei, in the district of Tomamae. It is located about thirty kilometers inland from the west coast of northern Hokkaidō, facing the Sea of Japan. Then, as now, it went by the popular name Rokusensawa, after the river which runs north to south through the valley.