Requesting the Deployment of the 7th Division
Night of December 12th
As the days went by the destruction increased, the exterminators were more beset by unease, and the frontier was tormented by inaction. Chief Kan judged that nothing more could be done at this point. “I’m going to request the 7th Division out of Asahikawa and we’ll go up into the mountains and hunt it down, all of us together.”
So late at night on the next day, the 13th, the thirty men of the 28th Infantry left in a hurry for Rumoi, but on the night of the 14th they heard news that the giant bear had been shot, and returned immediately.
Late on the night of the 13th, thirty men from the 28th Infantry left in a hurry for Rumoi, but on the night of the 14th, they apparently heard a report that the giant bear had been shot and killed. Satisfied, they returned to base. Another story has it that they never received the order in the first place. An order was definitely sent, but with that army no longer in existence, it is impossible to verify.
Breaking into the Houses
On the 13th the shooting squad held fast to the Miyoke house. The bear, which had not shown itself once, began breaking into the row of eight farmhouses around five in the morning. The first house to be invaded was that of Nakagawa Magoichi, upstream. It tore through two barrels of pickled herring, ate many of the chickens in the coop, and destroyed some of the stocked grains. And then, as if to add insult to injury, it left steaming droppings all over the floor of the house. The giant bear then went straight for the home of Kazuma Ishitarō. There, the bear pawed out the stone that Ishitarō’s wife, Asano, had put in the fire for warming, shredded the cloth wrapping on it, and chewed into it as though it were a potato. At that time, two members of the shooting squad, Yamamoto Heikichi and Suzuki were out on patrol, and by chance heard the sounds fifty meters away. They said that it sounded suspiciously like faint metal scraping.
The sharpshooters stuck around the Miyoke house on the 13th. At around five in the morning the bear appeared out of nowhere and began rapaging through the block of eight farmhouses. Its first target was Nakagawa Magoichi’s house, where it tore through two barrels of pickled herring, ate many of the chickens in the coop, and destroyed some of the stocked grains. It also left its signature gift of steaming droppings all over the floor. Next the giant bear then went to the home of Kazuma Ishitarō. There, the bear pawed out the stone that Ishitarō’s wife, Asano, had put in the fire for warming, shredded the cloth wrapping on it, and chewed into it as though it were a potato. Two sharpshooters out on patrol, Yamamoto Heikichi and Suzuki, heard the sound and said that it sounded like metal scraping on metal.
The bear tired of the Kazuma residence and went downstream to attack the house of the neighboring Matsuda Shigeharu. Without rest it destroyed the homes of Matsumura Nagasuke, Nakagawa Magoichi, Yoshikawa Terukichi, Tsuji Hashikura, and Matsu’ura Tōzaburō. It left not a single one of the houses on the right side of the river unspoiled. The only homes which escaped damage that day were those five on the opposite side of the river—the homes of Kanako Tomikura, Saitō Ishigorō, Iwazaki Kanakura, Sasaki Yūsaku, and Ikeda Tomikura. Thus, in a mere five days, ten of the fifteen homes in the frontier had been ransacked. The Ōta house had been attacked three times.
The beast did not return to the Miyoke home, which it had decimated. The bear might have learned from the trap at the Miyoke house, or it might have just been luck.