Hi, it’s me Akie, up here in Akita weathering out the summer heat like all of you. Seems awfully hot this summer for humans and critters alike, doesn’t it? This brings me to my little theme for this blog. I bet that title got your attention! (Just a little, hehehe.) Well, let me tell you about a little incident that happened to me last week. It was the inspiration for the title.

I was up at one of my favorite mountain onsens with a couple of girl friends escaping the heat of the day under the cool shade of the forest’s trees. In the evening we soaked our worries away in delightful onsen baths. Well, after a scrumptious dinner, and a couple of beers, the three of us decided to have one more bath before retiring for the night. We stepped into a delicious outdoor bath (rotenburo). It was sooooo nice! The moon was shinning, the stars were out, three giggling girls talking and splashing in the hot water with no one around…or so we thought!

Just as we had slipped into a relaxing mood in the warm waters of the onsen, we heard a small noise in the bushes behind the fence of the rotenburo. It wasn’t a big sound, at first, so we ignored it thinking it was just the mountain winds making the leaves and bushes dance. But then our imaginations started running away with us.

We started talking about the recent news reports about bear sightings all over Akita prefecture, so needless to say we were getting scared by ourselves, then….”BOOM! CRASH! SCRATCH!” This time the sounds were louder and definitely closer. We jumped out of that water faster than you can say, “BEAR!” We were not waiting around to see some nosey little black bear to come see what was happening in our onsen bath. NO WAY! We took-off running, not even pausing to pick up our towels! Can you imagine the scene? We must have been quite a sight – Three screaming naked girls dashing into their room and slamming the door behind them.

We collapsed on our futons laughing until our naked tummies started to ache. Now that we were safe we said to ourselves, “It was probably just a cat or dog or a tanuki (badger), or maybe even someone taking out the trash!” We decided, after a nice sleep, we would go back in the morning, pick up our towels, and look to see if there were any bear tracks behind the fence. What do you think we found?

So, there you have it, we were scared bare by a bear scare,,,hehehehe.

Ja, mata ne, until next time! And be safe.

Authors’ note:

Being Akie and her friends are fictitious characters created by our vivid imaginations, the incident above is also a fictitious event. However, there have been several sightings, warning and attacks by bears in Akita Prefecture resulting in injury and death. While these bears are not huge grizzly-size ones, they are dangerous and need to be treated with a measure of respect and caution. To our knowledge, we have not heard of any bears in or about the vicinities of onsens in this prefecture.