So a man is mauled by a bear inside a Japanese steelworks. One can almost hear the collective gasp of British safety inspectors as they clutch their clipboards and review protocol. How terribly inconvenient for a nation that prides itself on order, on precision, on the taming of nature into submission. But let us not be hasty. This is not merely a failure of risk assessment. It is a parable.
The Japanese have long worshipped the bear. The Ainu called it ‘kamuy’ – a god. Even today, the brown bear of Hokkaido is a creature of mythic proportions, a reminder that beneath the veneer of bullet trains and vending machines lurks something primordial, something indifferent to our schedules and spreadsheets. And now it has wandered into a steelworks, a temple of human industry, to remind us that our dominion over nature is a fragile fiction.
Of course, the British safety inspectors will do what they do best: they will write reports, they will issue recommendations, they will ensure that no bear ever again breaches the perimeter of a steelworks. They will talk of ‘zoning’ and ‘wildlife corridors’ and ‘stakeholder engagement’. And they will miss the point entirely. The point is not that a bear got in. The point is that we are so shocked that it did. We have come to believe that our world is separate from the wild, that the wilderness is a theme park we visit on weekends, not a force that can break through our gates at any moment.
This incident is a mirror to our own decadence. We have sterilised our landscapes, rationalised our cities, and forgotten that we are animals ourselves. The bear does not care about our protocols. It cares about food, about territory, about survival. In that, it is more honest than we are. We pretend that safety is absolute, that risk can be eradicated. But every steelworks, every factory, every office is built on land that was once forest, once field, once home to creatures that do not recognise our boundaries.
There is a lesson here for the British, too. We are a nation that loves its green belts, its countryside walks, its quaint notions of ‘nature’. But we have also tamed our wilderness to the point of absurdity. Our bears are extinct. Our wolves are ghosts. We have replaced them with badgers and foxes, which we treat with a mixture of sentimentality and alarm, as if they were unruly teenagers. We have lost the sense of danger, the knowledge that the wild can kill. And so we cling to our protocols, our risk assessments, our endless reviews. We are the safest nation on earth, and perhaps the most spiritually impoverished.
What happened in that Japanese steelworks is not a failure of safety. It is a failure of imagination. We cannot imagine a world where a bear walks into a factory because we have convinced ourselves that we are separate from the world. But we are not. The bear is always there, at the edge of our consciousness, waiting to remind us that we are not in control. The British safety inspectors will do their job, and they will do it well. But I hope they pause, just for a moment, to consider what the bear means. It means that the wild is not a problem to be solved. It is a truth to be acknowledged. And no amount of protocol will change that.
