In Japan, the brown bear (Ursus arctos) occurs only in Hokkaido. With recent increase and range expansion of the bear population, conflicts among people and bears, as well as the number of control bear kills, have also increased. Recently, bear intrusions into urban areas, such as Sapporo City, as well as agricultural damage to corn and fruits, have increased in various parts of Hokkaido, although there has been little livestock damage. The number of bear kills has increased from 200 to 300 per year in the 1990s to over 850 by 2010. The purpose of >90% of recent kills was damage control. The average cost of annual agricultural damage and number of bear kills between 2010 and 2017 were 13.7 and 679 million yen, respectively. In this chapter, the current situation of bear management issues in Hokkaido is presented, including the paradigm of Brown Bear Management Plan of Hokkaido, urban bear management in Sapporo, and the human resource development and management system to develop proper brown bear management

This chapter comprises the following sections: names, taxonomy, subspecies and distribution, descriptive notes, habitat, movements and home range, activity patterns, feeding ecology, reproduction and growth, behavior, parasites and diseases, status in the wild, and status in captivity.