An indigenous way of life in northern Japan is threatened by modern changes, yet continues to preserve ancient bear-hunting traditions in harmony with nature.

Koketsu ni irazunba, koji o ezu. If you do not enter the tiger's cave, you cannot catch its cub.

In modern English we might translate this to something banal, like “nothing ventured, nothing gained.” So let’s instead consider the imagery of the old Chinese proverb: A hunter-gatherer wrapped in furs, armed with only a sharpened stake, creeping into the lair of a fearsome beast with designs on stealing that which is most precious to it. Everything about the scene feels ancient, prehistoric, a desperate and perilous life that modern city-dwellers can scarcely imagine.

But for the Matagi, a mountain community in the northern Tohoku region, entering the tiger’s cave is the quotidian condition of life. Perhaps not literally – Japan’s last wild tigers went extinct during the Late Pleistocene – but Matagi culture is still defined by primeval ways and an understanding that risk is a necessary precursor to reward.

What, then, is the nature of their reward? And is reward even the right word? The Matagi are best known as bear hunters, but to think of their endeavors as trophy hunting would be disingenuous to a community that’s been practicing subsistence living since at least the Heian period (AD 787 – 1185).

The Matagi hunt these animals – as well as hares, foxes, pheasants, and serows – not simply as commercial resources but to provide sustenance to their families and neighbors, and as a traditional form of population control. They can track bears with precision, studying the weight distribution in a paw print to judge the animal’s direction of travel, and even invented a fly-fishing method called tenkara, still favored by anglers today. They are skilled foragers, capable of identifying nourishing plants and non-toxic fungi on the forest floor, and know which tree bark has the highest oil content for starting fires in dense snowfall.

They’re expert mountaineers, too, skilled at navigating challenging terrain, even through blizzards and snow drifts, and are capable of covering dozens of kilometers in a single day. Sure, Matagi communities have a history of trading furs and pelts, but the value proposition of their lifestyle is to be the stewards of the mountains; to ensure that nature’s equilibrium is maintained.

Matagi treat their role with utmost respect. Hunts and foraging trips are preceded by rituals – burning a morobi fir branch, offering prayers to the mountain goddess – after which, the divine grants access to the forests. Black bears are believed to be reincarnations of this goddess, so hunting them is an act of thanksgiving, supplication even.

Bear meat is offered to the goddess on the branches of a sacred kuromoji tree, ensuring the animal’s soul returns to the mountain and reminding the goddess that the Matagi are grateful for her bounty. When they eat bear meat, their conversation takes on the air of a eulogy; they’ll talk about the bear’s characteristics and habits, perhaps its age and what it has eaten as they feel the raw ursine power of the meat coursing through their veins. The Matagi do not take a bear’s life – they receive it.

It has been this way for untold centuries, with spirituality and ancient wisdom at the core of everything the Matagi do. But as with Indigenous cultures around the world, the Matagi way of life – and the principles it stands for – is under threat.

Hunting for the Ages

If you see images of the Matagi on a bear hunt, chances are you’ll be taken aback by the apparent brutality of it all. The aftermath looks like a still from Lady Snowblood, with carcasses being dragged helplessly between the trees, severed paws piled together like scalps, and blood splattered, Jackson Pollock-like, across the paper-white snow. Such scenes reflect the ceremonial weight of the hunt rather than any innate brutality, for the Matagi are not an especially brutal people. In fact, at face value there’s little to distinguish them from most modern hunters. Garbed in flannel shirts, khaki pants, waterproof boots, and high-vis fishing jackets, with shotguns or rifles slung over their shoulders, they could easily be hunting elk in the wilds of Wyoming. It’s the process of the hunt that defines them.

It all comes back to their relationship with their environment. Some Matagi believe they’re carrying on a hunting tradition in the Tohoku region that goes back more than 10,000 years. Because Matagi history was largely passed down through an oral tradition, the culture has opaque origins. The Matagi may have migrated northward from Nikko, or perhaps they were once part of the Ainu diaspora, concentrated mostly in Hokkaido.

The common origin story in Matagi lore is that a 9th-century hunter, with the wonderfully alliterative name Banji Banzaburo, helped a gongen (the incarnation of a god) defeat a mountain spirit in central Japan. The gongen then granted Banzaburo a hunting license, the first of its kind, allowing him to hunt beasts on any mountain in the archipelago. Banzaburo took his license north to Dewa Province, comprising modern-day Yamagata and Akita prefectures, where he became the progenitor of the Matagi. The area where he is believed to have resided, around Mt Moriyoshi, remains a heartland of Matagi culture; it’s said the heads of Matagi communities here still carry a handwritten copy of Banzaburo’s divine license.

The Matagi style of hunting was also informed by their environment – or more specifically, its geography. This might sound obvious, but whereas many of the world’s great hunting cultures existed in vast, open areas – the Plains Tribes of North America, the Masai of East Africa – where they could exhaust a resource before moving on to new pastures, the Matagi were required to hunt within limitations. The land of northern Japan was smaller, narrower, and the mountains and forests were discouraging of nomadic lifestyles.

So the Matagi learned to be sedentary and sustainable. Hunting a population of bears to extinction or harvesting vegetables with such abandon that they wouldn't grow back the following season could have had dire consequences. So they feasted on bear meat in the winter, detoxed with wild native plants like butterbur, fiddleheads, and dogtooth violets in spring, and foraged for mushrooms in the autumn.

Today the Matagi have access to modern food supply chains, but they persist with sustainable lifestyles, partly because they believe that nature has a kind of consciousness. This is represented by the goddess to whom they pay obeisance and to whose whims they are resigned. It’s because of this belief that old Matagi hunters would refrain from smoking and swearing and other uncouth behaviors when on the mountains. It’s also why women were forbidden from joining the hunt, and in some villages still are.

Yama no kami, the mountain goddess, is one of the many distrustful deities in Japan's confounding animistic pantheon. Matagi beliefs have long held that the goddess, wracked by jealousy, would look unfavorably upon communities that brought women on hunts or foraging trips, resulting in misfortune along the way. This is not some ironclad patriarchal decree – evidenced by the hunting communities now counting women among their ranks – but more a symbol of the reverence the Matagi show the natural world.

Stewards of the Mountains in the 21st Century

In the postwar era, Japan has not treated its environment with kindness. Timber demands have caused native tree cover to be replaced with monoculture forests of cedar and pine – these now account for 40% of Japan’s total forest area – resulting in what the Matagi call “green deserts.” These areas of identical trees set at identical widths give the impression of vitality but don’t actually promote life. The ghostly, vacant groves are not conducive to hunting or foraging; the Matagi must go deeper into the mountains to find thriving ecosystems, to find forests they can still protect.

It’s clichéd, yet absolutely true, to say that a reverence for nature is a fundamental aspect of Japanese culture. This is a society that has spent more than 1,000 years drinking and reveling under blooming cherry trees each spring. But with the expansion of metropolitan areas and pork-barrel construction projects, Japan’s wild and uncultivated nature – the endemic forests of beech and katsura trees, the verdant river valleys wreathed in fog – has become a mere canvas for pouring concrete and planting telephone poles and building things. As a result, many Japanese are now disconnected from their natural roots.

Matagi culture, with its blend of Shintoism, Taoist philosophy, and proto-Ainu beliefs, exists in deference to the natural world, connecting Japan to its oldest ways, to its innermost sense of self. It has been said that the Matagi may go extinct before the bear, but until then they will continue to enter the tiger’s cave, prepared to catch its cub.

About the Author: David is a Northern Irish freelance journalist, writer and author based in the UK and Tokyo. Fusing reporting and social commentary with extensive experience traveling throughout the country, he has published stories on travel, arts and culture, business and current affairs, and sports in Japan. His work has appeared in a range of national and international publications online and in print. He's also the author of two travel books, Intrepid Japan and the most recent edition of Frommer's Japan. You can find links to his work at www.davidmcelhinney.com.