🐻 For about a year and a half, a man in his seventies aimed a homemade launcher at his own body and pulled the trigger, over and over, until his torso was covered in bruises. He was trying to find the exact hardness of a plastic ball. The prefecture where he works has almost no bears in it.

The anti-algae paint company that got a phone call

Sunamiya sits in Imabari, a shipbuilding town on the island of Shikoku. Its main product is a water-based epoxy coating called Line Guard that stops algae growing on the concrete tanks of sewage plants and power stations. It also makes party crackers, novelty tape measures, and a security device called Ippatsu Checker, which uses gas pressure and a spring to fire a paint-marker ball at a fleeing suspect more accurately than a person could throw one. Capital: 6 million yen, about $37,500 at 160 yen to the dollar. The company profile traces its origins to the Genroku era (1688-1704) and records its incorporation on January 26, 1978.

Five years ago a firm that sells animal repellents called Akira Sunami, the president, with a problem. It also sold bear spray, and bear spray has a weakness its customers kept raising: wind. A canister that discharges a cloud is at the mercy of whichever way the air is moving. A ball is not. Could the security device be turned into something for bears?

A year and a half of shooting himself

The chemistry came first. Sunami settled on fermented starfish extract, which smells like rotting seafood, mixed with capsaicin from chili peppers. His research suggested 2 percent capsaicin was sufficient; he went with 2.6. Opening the container is enough to make you sneeze and weep, and filling the balls is unpleasant work.

The hard problem was the shell. A ball has to survive being launched and then shatter reliably at the far end of a fifteen-meter arc. Too tough and it bounces off the bear; too brittle and it bursts in the barrel, which would be a disaster. There is no standard bench test for that, so he tested it the direct way: firing the balls at himself, adjusting the shell, for a year and a half. He also left finished balls inside a parked car through a Japanese summer and in an open lot for a year, to check that heat and time would not turn them into hand grenades.

Three years in, the numbers were good. The ball leaves the barrel at 80 to 100 km/h, roughly 50 to 62 mph, and carries about 15 meters, against the 9 to 10 meters the distributor lists for a typical bear spray. Wind barely touches it, and it breaks when it lands.

Nobody would lend him a bear

He still refused to sell it, because he had never tested it on an actual bear. Lives were at stake, he told ABEMA, and for a manufacturer "it didn't work" is not an acceptable outcome.

So he went looking for a bear, and got turned down. Ranches said no. Zoos said no. Spraying capsaicin at a captive animal to prove a product works is, reasonably enough, something most keepers consider cruelty. The project stalled and Sunami came close to shelving it.

What restarted it was a news story. In the early hours of July 12, 2025, a newspaper delivery worker in his fifties was killed by a brown bear on a residential street in the town of Fukushima, in southern Hokkaido. Sunami's son watched the coverage and told his father to go back to work on it.

Eventually a facility agreed to help, and the test happened in early 2026. The bear caught the smell and threw itself around its enclosure in a way its keeper said he had never seen before. The launcher went on sale in May 2026 under the name Kintaro, after the folk-tale boy strong enough to wrestle a bear. It costs 27,500 yen including tax, about $170, and ships with two water-filled practice balls and one live one.

Why Japan is in the market for this

Last fiscal year was the worst since Japan's Environment Ministry began keeping count. It logged 238 people injured by bears and 13 killed, against a previous high of 219 and 6 in fiscal 2023. Sightings reached 50,801, more than double the old record, and 14,741 bears were taken under damage-control permits (both preliminary figures as of August 6, 2026). This year has not calmed down: as of the ministry's August 12 update, the April-to-July figures stood at 49 incidents, 53 people hurt, and 6 dead.

Meanwhile the people who deal with bears at close range are disappearing. In fiscal 2021, the most recent year the ministry has published, hunting licences numbered 213,400, down from 517,800 in 1975 but roughly flat for the past two decades. One person can hold several, so these are licences rather than people; Japan's national hunters' association puts the real figure at around 150,000 hunters. Flat is misleading, because the composition flipped. Class-1 firearms licences, the ones you need for a shotgun or rifle, fell from 493,700 to 84,400 over the same period, roughly one-sixth of what they were. Trapping licences went the other way, climbing to 119,500. Traps are useless when a bear is already walking down a residential street. And 119,100 of the 213,400 licences, about 56 percent, are held by people 60 or older.

That is the gap Kintaro is aimed at. More bears in town, fewer people licensed to shoot one, and a legal framework in which firing a gun inside a residential area needs a mayor's authorization. Which leaves ordinary people carrying something, or carrying nothing.

The irony is that almost nobody in Ehime will ever need it. In the wild, Shikoku's Asiatic black bears survive only around Mount Tsurugi, in the neighbouring prefectures of Tokushima and Kochi. A 2017 estimate put the whole island population at 16 to 24 animals. A fiscal 2025 survey by the Shikoku Regional Forest Office, the Environment Ministry's regional office and the Shikoku Institute of Natural History, published on June 19, 2026, confirmed 27.

Does it actually beat bear spray?

Here the marketing runs into the evidence. The standard reference is a 2008 study in the Journal of Wildlife Management by Tom Smith and colleagues, covering 83 bear spray incidents in Alaska between 1985 and 2006. Spray stopped the bear's unwanted behaviour in 92 percent of brown bear encounters and 90 percent with American black bears. Of everyone carrying spray, 98 percent came out of a close-range encounter uninjured.

And the wind? It interfered with accuracy in 7 percent of incidents, and in every single one of those the spray still reached the bear. The premise Kintaro was built on turns out to be real but small.

What the launcher actually buys you is different. Start with distance: the company has also published footage of a test fired from 20 meters. That figure and the 15-meter effective range both come from the maker's own demonstrations rather than independent testing. A long barrel is easier to aim than a can held at arm's length, too. And the payload bursts away from you rather than in a cloud you are standing inside, which matters more than it sounds: 14 percent of spray users in Smith's data reported dosing themselves to some degree.

What it costs you is the follow-up shot. Kintaro is single-fire, and reloading with a bear closing the distance is not a plan. Sunami says this himself, recommending the launcher be carried alongside a spray rather than instead of one, which is an unusual thing for an inventor to say about his own product.

The evidence gap is wider still. Smith's dataset is two decades of wild, unplanned, close-range encounters. Kintaro's is one caged bear reacting to a smell. Nor does the Alaskan study cover Asiatic black bears, the species behind most of the Honshu attacks. In the US, bear spray is registered with the Environmental Protection Agency as a pesticide, and registered products carry between 1.0 and 2.0 percent capsaicin and related capsaicinoids. Kintaro's 2.6 percent ball sits outside that band. Japan has no equivalent registration scheme, so the question never came up.

Japanese law does not treat bear spray as a weapon under the Firearms and Swords Control Act. But the Minor Offenses Act penalizes carrying concealed, without justifiable reason, an implement capable of causing serious bodily harm. Heading into the mountains counts as a reason. Carrying one through a city centre may earn you a conversation with a police officer.

As for what happens next, Sunami told the broadcaster on August 29, 2026 that the Self-Defense Forces had shown interest and would trial the launcher the following week. There has been no confirmation of that from the ministry.

Japan has already moved past arguing about whether ordinary people should have non-lethal ways to stop a bear. The question now is which ones work. A lot of countries have not reached that point. Where you live, can you legally carry something that fires capsaicin at a wild animal, and would a shop actually sell you one?

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