A viral 2026 clip of a mother bear charging a car in Japan points to a longer, dateable story: the steady expansion of Asiatic black bears and brown bears into depopulated rural towns and suburban edges. Since the 2000s, abandoned farmland, shrinking hunting communities, climate-driven food shortages, and changing conservation rules have turned bear encounters from rare wildlife news into a recurring public-safety and policy crisis, with record attack years and emergency culling measures in the 2020s. This timeline was generated automatically by TimeStrands AI from Wikipedia research. Facts are sourced; framing may be imperfect.