If you are looking for an alarm system that incorporates the latest in AI-enabled bear facial recognition technology, Japan’s Daiwa Tsushin has the thing for you. And, depending on risk appetite, for your portfolio.
Trained on 50,000 photos and videos of bears native to Japan and empowered by a dedicated server, Face Bear will trigger anti-bear sirens and alert the property owner to the threat of clawed rampage via smartphone, but completely ignore gentler wildlife.
It is a product forged in unsettling and revelatory times. Japan’s bears, in their emboldened advance on cowering towns, are interrogating the nation on global warming, demographics and industrial policy.
Between April and the end of July this year, Japan had experienced a near record 55 bear attacks on humans, thousands more bear sightings than usual and intensive media coverage of the ursine scourge. There have been horrible maulings, three deaths and an unprecedented legal revision to accelerate the authorisation of lethal force as the bears encroach on everything from school sports days, golf tournaments and shopping streets to airport runways, motorways and bullet train tracks.
Unofficial polls of public opinion capture a nation divided. Earlier this summer, when a 52-year-old newspaper delivery man was fatally savaged by a bear in Hokkaido, local authorities fielded hundreds of calls from the public: many pleaded for the bears to be shown clemency, others insisted rangers “shoot the lot”.
The clearest message is straightforwardly alarming. Expert explanations for the rise in Japan’s bear-related incidents over recent years cite the role of climate change — in particular Japan’s shortening rainy seasons, increased freak floods and accumulating tally of record heatwaves — for disrupting the bears’ natural food supply. Nut and other nourishing plant yields are smaller, fruit ripens too early in the feeding cycle, and the smell of urban cuisine drives hangry bears into town.
The second explanation is also dispiriting for ageing, shrinking Japan: the bears are expanding their habitats into what was once irrefutably human territory because they are less impeded. The human population of firearm-licensed rangers has dwindled and greyed. Rural villages increasingly lie near empty as younger Japanese move to cities and the older ones die.
Estimates of Japan’s total bear population are rough, but domestic media cite figures of around 12,000 brown bears and 44,000 black bears. The former has risen steadily. The latter is thought to have tripled over the last 12 years. Japan’s human population, over that period, fell by 5mn. Depending on your taste for symbolism, it paints a demoralising picture of a country facing national dotage: the old and less vigorous incumbent versus the fecund and ravenous animal spirits on its borders.
But such a picture underplays what continues to make Japan so formidable as an industrial power, and the risks of giving that up. Earlier this year, as the first bear attack stories began to proliferate, investors began screening the 3,948 companies listed on Tokyo’s various stock exchanges to find which stocks would stand to benefit from the panic.
Well over a dozen companies, on an initial trawl, had potentially lucrative exposure to the narrow theme of bear panic via what in many cases are obscure subsidiaries. The basket included four companies like Maeda Kosen, which specialise in sensor-equipped electric fences, and others like Sekisui Jushi, which makes equipment for protecting crops from larger animals. The exposure of Miroku, Japan’s largest manufacturer of hunting rifles was obvious; less so that of Odakyu Electric Railway, whose “Hunter Bank” subsidiary is an online matching service between trained bear hunters and forest workers with a bear problem.
Even as it has retreated demographically, Japan (and by extension its enormous pool of listed companies) remains a full-spec industrial economy. For some years now, that diversity and the perceived surfeit of obscure, non-core (often unprofitable) subsidiaries has been under ideological attack both from investors and from a government keen to make the market more attractive. The streamlining process is already under way, but the country should be wary of giving up too much of its diversity.
Japan’s “more is more” industrial instincts are what convinced Daiwa Tsushin, primarily a security camera business, to get into the AI bear face recognition game. Sadly, its stock has fallen 27 per cent since the start of the year. Mauled, repeatedly, by market bears.