One morning, a roughly 1.5-meter Asian black bear turned up at an unstaffed rural station. Security cameras clearly caught it ducking under the ticket gate and ambling along the platform.
The handful of passengers waiting for the first train quietly backed away while a station worker alerted local authorities and police. The bear slipped into the trackside brush before the train arrived, and no one was injured.
From Kasamatsu
In Tohoku, bears aren’t unusual — every autumn they come down to the villages. …But this is the first time I’ve seen one pass through a ticket gate. The Asian black bear is naturally very timid, an animal that lives by avoiding people. For one to walk a platform that boldly means the mountains are that short on food. When the acorn harvest keeps failing, these “commutes” become more common. Behind the joke, the mountains are going hungry.