{"id":432,"date":"2026-06-12T08:46:54","date_gmt":"2026-06-12T08:46:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.junkatanuma.com\/?p=432"},"modified":"2026-06-12T08:46:54","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T08:46:54","slug":"whose-shoes-are-you-wearing%e3%83%bcon-bears-the-concept-of-nature-and-the-fact-that-all-we-can-do-is-admit-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.junkatanuma.com\/?p=432","title":{"rendered":"Whose Shoes Are You Wearing?\u30fcOn bears, the concept of “nature,” and the fact that all we can do is admit it"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A bear appeared in the busy downtown of Utsunomiya. A full-grown animal ambled through the pine groves of Amanohashidate in Kyoto, then swam across the inlet of Aso-kai to the far shore. A photograph of the great body, struck by a tranquilizer dart and lying limp on its back, raced across the country. And the calls flooded the local government offices. Don’t kill it. Set it free in the mountains. Return it to where it belongs.<\/em> The staff, worn down, can only answer: “We are not in a position to respond to that.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is a great deal folded into this scene that is worth thinking about. I do not write here to win an argument. Nor do I wish to silence, with cold logic, the people who call to say “don’t kill it.” Quite the opposite. I want to keep faith with that wish all the way to its end. I want to take the wish by the hand and walk with it, to see where it actually leads. And in doing so, we find ourselves descending\u2014floor by floor, as if breaking through one layer after another\u2014into an unexpected depth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I. First, spread out the legal map<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Before emotion, let us confirm how the facts are arranged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A bear is neither “property” nor “a pet.” Under Japanese law it is wildlife, handled within the framework of the Wildlife Protection and Management Act. It belongs to no one; as a rule it may not be captured. But when there is danger to human life or to the living environment, a local government may capture and dispose of it under a permit for the control of harmful wildlife. For emergencies such as appearances in urban areas, a system of emergency firearm use\u2014permitting discharge even in residential zones\u2014has also been put in place in recent years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In other words, culling is not the staff member’s emotion or whim. It is an administrative act grounded in law. This is the first place where it parts ways with the language of feeling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the Animal Welfare and Management Act, which the plea “don’t kill it” calls to mind, does not in principle extend to wild bears. What that law protects are “animals under care”\u2014pets and livestock held in human keeping. The management of wild individuals belongs to a different law entirely. The feeling of “poor thing” often stands on a confusion of these two laws. The layers are, from the start, different.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

II. Walking the wish “set it free” to its end<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

So what happens if we follow the wish\u2014”set it free in the mountains,” “return it to nature”? Let us think not from refusal, but from accompaniment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Just put it back where you caught it”\u2014the most natural objection<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Say “return it to where it came from,” and the reply comes at once: “It’s not complicated. Just put it back near where you caught it\u2014near the forest, if it was downtown.” This is plain, and at first glance reasonable. No need to trace its origins; the point of capture is clear. Just release it on the nearby mountainside. So we must not brush this aside carelessly. We receive it head-on, first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But here a quiet substitution takes place. “The place of capture” is not “the place it came from.” The place it came from is the home base where the individual fed, moved, and denned day to day. The place of capture is merely the single point where a human last secured it. If it was caught downtown, then the place of capture is<\/em> downtown. A bear’s home base could not possibly be the city center. So to carry out “put it back where you caught it” literally would mean releasing it in the middle of town\u2014and no one wants that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which means that even the person who says “put it back where you caught it” does not truly mean the place of capture. Without noticing, they have rewritten the condition to “to the nearby forest, where there are no people.” Here the destination has quietly slid\u2014from the clearly identifiable point<\/em> of capture to the unidentifiable expanse<\/em> of “a nearby forest.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And where is “a nearby forest”? Near a city, there is no forest where a bear can live. It must be carried to some mountainside farther off. At that instant, the clarity of “put it back where you caught it” has vanished. Which mountainside? How far away is acceptable? Does it hold the range and food a bear needs? The question circles right back to the very “unidentifiable expanse” we had just denied. As a point, it can be identified but there is no sense in returning it there; the moment we widen it to a meaningful place, it can no longer be identified. From this round trip, there is no escape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moreover, returning it “nearby” carries its own danger. The very fact that it came out into the city shows that this individual knows the route into human territory and has learned that there is food there. Release it near the same place, and the odds are high it returns by the same route. The most plainly sensible option\u2014”put it back nearby”\u2014is also the one with the highest risk of reappearance. Beneath that plainness, the administration would be manufacturing, with its own hands, the most foreseeable risk of renewed harm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is no authority to move it in the first place<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Then suppose we wish for “somewhere else, a distant mountain.” But the local government does not own the bear. Its authority to capture and dispose of an individual that happened to appear within its jurisdiction, for the safety of residents, derives from a single purpose: to remove danger within its own jurisdiction<\/em>. If so, the geographic reach of that authority must also be confined to the inside of its own jurisdiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here lies a reversal that is easily overlooked. Culling is an act of “extinguishing the source of danger within one’s own jurisdiction,” and so it can be justified by jurisdictional authority. But relocation to a distant area is an act of “moving the source of danger into another jurisdiction,” and a local government with no authority whatsoever over the destination has no grounds for it. Even for the same “disposal,” culling lies inside the authority, relocation outside it. “Set it free” is to demand the exercise of an authority the government does not possess.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The “nature” to return it to does not exist in this country<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

And then, the deepest layer. What the person who says “return it to the mountains” pictures is a vague “nature”: an untouched wilderness, belonging to no one, lying outside the human world. Release it there, the image goes, and the bear is severed from the human realm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But within the territory of Japan, “ownerless nature” in that sense scarcely exists. The national land is exhausted into private, public, or state ownership. Mountains are no exception. Privately held forests have landowners; even the places called deep mountains or old-growth forest are, for the most part, state forests under national management.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So to release a bear into the mountains in Japan is, in conception, to “return it to nature,” but in legal substance it can only ever be to “place a source of danger onto land that some specific party owns and manages.” Since ownerless nature does not exist, the place of release is, by logical necessity, always someone’s domain of rights. One pictures a destination without a subject\u2014”to nature”\u2014but the real destination always has a subject.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thus the wish “return it to the mountains” becomes unfulfillable in three ways at once. The origin cannot be identified. The authority to move it does not exist. And the nature to return it to no longer remains in the national land.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

III. Walk all the way to a deserted island, and the value inverts<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Here let us concede a hundred steps further. “Nature is simply a place without people.” Let us accept, whole, the definition most convenient to the one who wishes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Apply that definition to the map of Japan, and what remains? Land without people has all but vanished from the country. The only thing that strictly satisfies “the absence of people” is, perhaps, a deserted island cut off by sea. Carry the wish to its very end, and the “nature” the bear returns to converges on an uninhabited island.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the instant we arrive at that island, whether it can be called “nature” collapses. The bear is an animal of the forest, with a wide home range, dependent on diverse foods\u2014beechnuts, acorns, plants, insects. It can live only within a rich forest ecosystem. Yet most of the uninhabited islands off Japan’s coast are small, poor in vegetation, with neither the forest nor the food to sustain a bear’s diet. Ringed by sea, there is no room even to extend a home range.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That place satisfies the single point of “no people” and utterly betrays the condition of “a place where a bear can live.” The “untouched nature” of the human image and the “livable environment” for a bear turned out to be different things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here the value inverts. “Returning the bear to nature = the bear’s happiness” was the starting premise of the wish. Yet the deserted island, reached by carrying that very scheme to its end, is a closed environment with no food and no escape. To place a bear there is, while appearing to keep it alive, to drive it toward slow starvation and decline. It may make it suffer longer than an immediate disposal would. The “bear’s unhappiness” the wisher meant to avoid is realized, by the logic of the wish itself, in another\u2014and crueler\u2014form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No one has been reviled. We merely took the wish by the hand and walked with it to where it arrives. And the wish came out at the place where it betrays itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

IV. Descending\u2014to the bottom of the words “for the bear’s sake”<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

From here we break through the floors of cognition, one layer at a time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first floor: “returning it to nature is happiness” is a human projection<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

“It is happiness to return the bear to nature”\u2014whose viewpoint is this judgment? The bear has expressed neither “I want to return to nature” nor “I don’t want to be killed.” This is a story projected onto the bear by humans\u2014especially by humans who live in cities and gaze on nature as an object of loss and nostalgia. The romanticism of “an animal that returns to nature is happy” is a reflection of the human view of nature, not the welfare of the bear itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Notice this projection, and one’s own footing shakes too. In this essay I was about to write, “from the bear’s side, less pain is better.” But even that measure of welfare is something humans, reasoning by analogy from human sensibility, have applied to the bear. We do not know what a bear feels as happiness, how it experiences pain, how it receives\u2014or does not receive\u2014death. There is, in principle, no means of access to a bear’s interior. The very phrase “what is better from the bear’s side” does not, strictly, hold. There is only “the bear’s side as imagined by humans.” I, who criticized the wisher, stand inside the same structure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second floor: “the bear belongs to nature” is also a projection<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

But that criticism still kept one premise intact: that “the bear is a creature of the side called nature.” The very moment we debate whether returning it to nature is happiness, we have already conceded that “the bear belongs, originally, over there.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let us question it. The bear that lives in Japan does not dwell in some untouched wilderness without humans. It lives in the very mountains and fields of Japan, where humans have settled, farmed, planted, cut forest roads. The forest the bear walks is a forest humans have tended for centuries. The bear is not in “a nature without humans”; it lives overlapping territory with humans, right beside them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is an admittedly anthropomorphic supposition, but\u2014if a bear has any apprehension of the world at all, it may not recognize itself as “a being on the side of nature,” cut off from humans. It may live mountain and village, the places with people and without, as one continuous stretch of space\u2014as merely “where there is food \/ none,” “dangerous \/ safe”\u2014with a large creature called human<\/em> somewhere within it. The line that says “from here on is the human domain” is not drawn in the bear’s world. The only one drawing that line is the human.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The third floor: the very concept of “nature” is a human framework<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Then one floor lower. The crow perches on the wire; the gull scavenges scraps at the fishing port; the sparrow nests under the eaves; the squirrel crosses the trees of the park; the raccoon dog walks the edge of the housing district; the deer comes down to the village and eats the fields. These creatures do not live “within nature.” They live simply, overlapping the places where humans live. There is no line anywhere dividing “animals living in nature” from “animals that come out into human territory.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Nature” is a counter-concept humans posited outside their own sphere of life. Human\/nature, artificial\/wild, inside\/outside. This dichotomy is a line humans drew to bring order to the world; it is not a division that exists in the world beforehand. The concept of nature is born only once there is a human to conceptualize it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What exists, as fact, is only this: every living thing inhabits one ecosystem, the planet Earth\u2014the island chain called Japan. Nothing more, nothing less. “Nature,” “human settlement,” “the wild”\u2014all are merely human vocabulary, carved out after the fact from that ecosystem by humans. On the side of the ecosystem, that boundary line is not drawn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Come this far, and the whole argument inverts, ground and all. “Return it to nature” was not saying “return it to a place not on the map”; it was saying “return it to a place humans merely imagine to lie off the map.” The destination was, from the start, only in the human head. Even the description “the bear came out into human territory” presupposes a fictional line. The bear did not cross a border. It moved within a single ecosystem. It looks like crossing only because humans draw a line and then describe the bear as having stepped over it. Even the framing of “conflict” was made by humans. The problem does not lie on the side of the ecosystem. It lies on the side of the line that humans drew.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fourth floor: yet beneath the concept, the order of things is real<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Here, to keep from falling into nihilism, we must set down a decisive distinction. The concept “nature” is no more than a human framework. But that means the naming<\/em>, the classifying<\/em>, the story<\/em> of “nature” is fiction\u2014it does not mean that the workings actually occurring within the ecosystem are themselves fiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The word “nature” is human. But that a bear eats something and is eaten by something, that numbers rise and fall with the abundance of food, that one relation conditions another\u2014this chain of workings occurs in fact, whether or not humans name it. The concept is a human invention, but the order of things is there from before humans. Strip off the name, and the working remains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that order is not “the strong eat the weak.” When a bear meets another large creature, or a small one, what happens is not decided by mere strength. It may prey or be preyed upon; the two may avoid each other; a small creature may, through disease or parasitism, bring a large individual to death. Food, territory, breeding season, population\u2014countless conditions interlace, and the result is decided. The strong do not always win. The order of things is not a hierarchy of force, but the totality of workings in which the relation of conditions decides the outcome. “Survival of the fittest,” too, was one of the stories humans laid over that order\u2014humans who wished to justify the rule of the strong as the law of nature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here comes the anticipated objection: “But humans have weapons and tools. So the relation between humans and animals lies outside the order of things.” Yet monkeys, too, use tools. They crack nuts with stones, fish for insects with twigs. The use of tools is not a boundary line that cuts humans off from the ecosystem. It is a difference of degree, not of kind. However advanced human weapons are, that does not mean humans have “stepped outside the order.” That, too, is an event inside the order\u2014an ability one species acquired. One species has fangs, one has venom, one has tools and language and law. The human’s tools and the monkey’s stone lie, from the order’s vantage, on the same plane. Humans have not transcended the order. They are merely one species that happened to develop tools to an extreme.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014Of course, I have no intention of applying this directly to human society. To say, among humans, “it’s the order of things, so let the strong have the weak,” would be a justification of barbarism. To admit the reality of the order is one thing; to make the order a norm for human society is another thing entirely. The former is acknowledging a fact; the latter is the error of deriving an ought<\/em> from an is<\/em>. To admit that the order exists is not to say one must obey it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fifth floor: therefore, every human solution is a human convenience<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Once we admit that the order is real, that it is not survival of the fittest, and that humans are not exceptional merely for their tools\u2014the “solution” to the bear problem shifts its position.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Human law, human logic, human ethics all came after<\/em> the order. That a bear and a human live in one ecosystem, meet, and arrive at some outcome\u2014this working was there long before humans made laws. Law does not control the order. On the ground of the order, humans merely build, for their own convenience, a small enclosure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So every solution humans bring to this problem\u2014”humanely,” “animal welfare,” “nature conservation,” “environmental protection”\u2014each one is a human response to the order, not the order itself. The order holds no solutions. The order merely works; within it there is no concept of “solution.” The one demanding a “solution” is only the human. The humane, the protective, the caring\u2014all are attempts by humans “to realize, upon the order, an outcome acceptable to humans,” and however far you press them, they are no more than landing points seen from the human viewpoint, convenient to humans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“For the bear’s sake,” “for nature’s sake,” “for the environment’s sake”\u2014peel them down to the very last, and they arrive at “for the sake of the world humans wish would be so.” There is no other place for a human to stand. On the side of the order there is neither sake nor wish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

V. So what can be done\u2014to admit it<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Break through this far, and one nearly falls into the void. But one does not fall. Rather, it is from here that the matter of responsibility first takes on its precise weight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even if “nature” is a concept, even if every human solution is a human convenience, the drawing of lines is something humans cannot stop doing. The human is a creature that cannot live without drawing lines, dividing inside from outside, enclosing a zone of safety. To make a field, to build a house, to protect a child\u2014each is itself the drawing of a line. So the problem is not “do not draw lines.” It is whether one can bear the karma of having to draw the line even while knowing the line is one’s own drawing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here the danger of thinking “I can stand in the bear’s place” comes into view. If one can believe “this is for the bear’s sake,” “the bear too is happier this way,” then the weight of the decision is shifted onto the bear’s interest, and the one who decided is eased. Culling, “for the bear’s sake”; release, “for the bear’s sake”\u2014the one who believes he can speak for the bear is making the bear he speaks for shoulder the responsibility for the judgment he himself handed down. To think one can stand in another’s place is not kindness. It is the outsourcing of responsibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conversely, admit “I absolutely cannot stand there,” and the place to shift it onto disappears. Since one cannot say it is for the bear’s sake, the decision returns, whole, as a human decision, to the human. One cannot use the bear as a shield. So the awareness of “I cannot stand there” becomes, not an excuse for irresponsibility, but the act of taking responsibility back into one’s own hands. Humility turns, just as it is, into the weight of responsibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But there is one distinction that must not collapse. “Cannot stand in the bear’s place” and “need not imagine the bear” are entirely different. To admit one cannot stand there is not to abandon imagination. Quite the reverse. The one who thinks he can stand there completes his imagining in a single stroke\u2014stopping his thought at “the bear is happy in nature.” The one who knows he cannot stand there, presupposing that his imagining is always wrong somewhere, has no choice but to keep updating it. Knowing one cannot reach, and reaching out the hand all the same. That distance\u2014of the hand extended while holding the knowledge of its not-reaching\u2014is, I think, the “between” of human and other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As for the matter before our eyes: a learned individual that has already come out into the city carries a high risk of reappearance and renewed harm, and if safety comes first, culling remains as a bitter process of elimination. There is no dramatic “better” there. The real contest is upstream. The bear comes into the city because the buffer zone of satoyama<\/em>\u2014the in-between of human and deep mountain\u2014has lost its function. Cut off the attractants, secure sightlines, design the separation of ranges\u2014and if the bear does not come out, the very dilemma of kill-or-release never arises. Yet even that design, too, is entirely from the human viewpoint, a human convenience. So long as one does not forget that\u2014then, even so, one does it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Coda: Whose shoes are you wearing?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

To the question of what to do about the bear, there is no correct answer. The measures I raised were all human conveniences. And no one can stand in the bear’s place; “nature” is no more than a human concept; and the order beneath it pays the human wish not the slightest regard. Yet this whole series of impossibilities is not despair. It teaches the precise weight of the responsibility a human must bear when, knowing it is nothing but one’s own convenience, one must nonetheless decide the life and death of another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

True humility is not to withdraw one’s hand, saying “I do not know.” It is to know one does not know, and to take the full weight of the decision onto one’s own side. To not say, “it was for your sake.” To admit: this was a human convenience. And, having admitted it, still to keep reaching out toward the place one cannot reach. That is the one honesty available to the human who has come to possess the concept of “nature.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One last thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To the person who wishes, “don’t kill it, return it to where it came from”\u2014your wish is precious. I have no intention, none at all, of denying it. But just once, stop, and check:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The shoes you are wearing now\u2014are they truly the bear’s shoes? Or\u2014<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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