The Great Deeds of Ōgawa Haruyoshi
The house which became bear-hunting headquarters was that of Ōgawa Yosakichi. His third son, Haruyoshi, was six years old at the time of the incident. “The mind which with I remember what happened is that of a child, and so those days were overwhelmingly frightening. I hated bears so much I didn’t know what to do,” Ōgawa recalls. Ōgawa, known as a gentle figure, chose not to follow his father into farming but instead to make his name as a renowned matagi hunter. The brown bear left enough of a mark on him to swear revenge. His original vow was to take the lives of ten bears for each life the bear had taken. By the time the bear was shot down, it had killed six people, plus the unborn child. Three had been wounded, and one of those died less than three years later, due to complications from injuries dealt by the bear. So that number rose to eight. It was 1942, the year Japan entered World War II, that Ōgawa decided to dedicate his life to hunting bears. He was thirty-two. He spent the next thirty-seven years, whenever he had a free moment from his farm, roaming the wilds with his rifle. He spent three of those years as a drafted army recruit, and he did not pick up his gun for another four, but in those thirty-odd years Ōgawa had killed one hundred and two bears.
Seventy-six of these were solo kills. The remaining twenty-six were done with the cooperation of either Hirai Yukimatsu, a Kotanbetsu doctor, Katō Yoshikazu, a car salesman, or Tsuji Masaru, a Sankei farmer. Such a high (verified) count could not have been achieved by one merely hunting for hunting’s sake. The fact that he showed me his collection of 123 skulls, which he curated to commemorate his hunting days, also helps to verify the count.
When I think of Ōgawa, one unforgettable sentence comes to mind. “It’s the joy of eating as much as you want, and not being able to remember having eaten this much before.” Tsuji Kamezō and Ikeda Kamejirō had similar thoughts on the matter.
Abe Mayu and Hasumi Tsuneo were the first settler casualties of the brown bear. In pain over these deaths, all of the pioneers cooked up a tiny helping of white rice. White rice, scarce in these distant parts, was usually reserved for important holidays, with meals usually consisting of soba noodles, wheat, pumpkins, or potatoes. Such a high-class meal was beyond what the settlers had come to expect.
The great deeds of Ōgawa Haruyoshi are not limited to his hunting. In 1977, when he killed his hundredth bear, Ōgawa erected a memorial in Sankei Shrine at his own expense to commemorate the lives of Saitō Haruyoshi and the other victims. And today, Ōgawa himself rests in that same shrine.