Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be rainy with scattered showers and a high of 65. Sunrise is 5:15 and sunset is 8:36 for 15 hours 21 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waxing crescent with 8.5 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1885, the Statue of Liberty arrives in New York Harbor.
Japan is a technologically advanced, modern society. And yet, even advanced societies sometimes find themselves culturally stymied when faced with challenges and threats. Japan’s approach to bear attacks — that is, real attacks on people in Japan — is an example of a culturally timid approach when bears (family Ursidae) are chasing, mauling, or eating people (family Hominidae).
Posts from FREE WHITEWATER have chronicled Japan’s tepid response to bear attacks.
How Japanese officials have tried to use bells and whistles to ward off bears (from 12.29.25):
How Japanese officials tried to use robot wolves to scare bears away (from 5.14.26):
How bears have been opening windows and escaping from capture to chase Japanese residents around cities (from 6.6.26):
What’s been the response to these bear attacks? Japanese hunters are now drilling by tracking a man in a bear mask:
(It’s sadly fitting, somehow, that the man in the drill complained, by the way, that his bear mask was hot and he couldn’t see anything. Honest to goodness.)
Japanese officials’ diffident response to bear depredations risks turning parts of the country into a real-life version of a 1970s B-movie:
What works better than bells, whistles, robots, and drills with masks?
This: Wis. Dep’t of Nat. Res., Learn to Hunt Bear, Wisconsin DNR (last visited June 17, 2026).
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Upcoming posts (in no decided order): A Whitewater Comparative Analysis, Whitewater’s Workforce, Outcome-Driven Argumentation, and a New Ethics Ordinance.