# Yamamoto Heikichi

Yamamoto Heikichi (Japanese: 山本 兵吉, 1858 – July 1950) was a Japanese hunter. He is best known as a local hero for killing Kesagake, the giant brown bear involved in the Sankebetsu brown bear incident. He is reportedly to have killed over 300 brown bears in his lifetime. A resident of On'ne-no-sawa, Onishika, Rumoi District, Hokkaido (now Onishikatashiro, Obira), his main hunting grounds were the mountains of what was then Teshio Province, such as Mount Onishika.

## Biography

Yamamoto Heikichi was reportedly from Shosanbetsu, Tomamae District, Hokkaido. He was alcohol-loving and considered the best shot in the whole Soya Province, a legendary imperial hunter who was called the "sword of Soya" in that neck of the woods.

### Early life

Born at the end of the Edo period, he was a hunter in the mountains from a young age. He was nicknamed "Sabasaki's older brother" after stabbing a brown bear to death with a deba bōchō when he was young in Sakhalin. It has also been reported that it was possible to kill a Japanese woodpecker and a Japanese squirrel with a single live bullet. When the Russo-Japanese War broke out, he was 46 and joined the army. He later carried around with him the Russian-made bolt action rifle Berdan II M1870 on a daily basis and also kept his trademark military cap as the spoils of war.
In the spring of 1915, he found a brown bear's hibernation hole entering the national forest in Kotanbetsu, Tomamae. In attempt to drive a stake through the top, he slipped inside and the bear attacked him. He hugged its chest and yelled to his comrades at the entrance to shoot, but they ran away and then also the bear. It was reportedly his most upset and disappointed moment.

### Sankebetsu brown bear incident

On December 9-10, 1915, when he was 57 years old, seven settlers were killed by a male brown bear, the dreaded man-eater nicknamed Kesagake by himself, in Sankebetsu Rokusen-sawa, Tomamae District (now Sankei). Around this time, he had pawned off his gun due to debt and, when he happened to come to the vicinity of Sankebetsu thinking of hunting, he heard about the incident. According to a resident of Sankei, he reluctantly participated in the bear suppression chosen team sent by the Japanese government late in the night from December 10-12, though the details are unknown. At roughly 6 p.m. on December 13, he witnessed a team member named Suzuki and a brown bear breaking into an unoccupied house, but he was unable to shoot them to death.
On the 14th, the team entered the mountains in a large-scale climbing. He entered the mountain from a different path than the rest of the team, and around 200 meters in he saw a brown bear resting in a large mizunara tree near the summit. After moving forward about 20 meters, he took shelter in a Japanese elm tree and shot the bear near the heart. However, the bear stood up and glared at him. He fired a second shot, the bullet reportedly hitting the bear's head. At 10 a.m., the brown bear that had killed seven people was killed by Yamamoto. As a reward, he was given a military uniform and a hat without a license tag by the Hokkaido government. However, he never wore them to hunt, usually wearing a tenugui over his cheeks, straw shoes, and a blanket-like cloth over his sashiko. He reportedly went hunting with things tied around his body and a gun strapped to his shoulder.
On the night he shot the brown bear, he was drinking alcohol at the Sankebetsu Youth Center and, after the mayor of Sankebetsu, Yosakichi Ōkawa, tried to hand him money collected from the villagers, he was drinking heavily. He got angry and fired his gun into the roof, rejecting that kind of money.

### Later life

Afterwards, he built a house in Sankebetsu and moved there with his family from Onishika, the village where he had lived prior to the incident. However, because the villagers called him a "bear-killing hero", he often drank alcohol and fought with the villagers. He would drink and beat his wife, so it was common for her to return to Onishika with their children. However, he was kind to children and often reportedly taught Haruyoshi Ōkawa, the son of the district chief who later become a matagi, how to shoot bears.
He would live in Sankebetsu for the next two to three years. In novels and movies, he is often portrayed as a very misbehaved person, but according to his grandson, Akimitsu Yamamoto, who works at the Toyosaki Post Office in Shosanbetsu, he sometimes got rough when he drank alcohol, but was always kind and caring. In July 1950, he passed away at the age of 92 in his hometown of Shosanbetsu.

## Portrayals

Yamamoto was featured prominently in Akira Yoshimura's novel Brown Bear Storm (羆嵐, Higuma Arashi), based on the Sankebetsu brown bear incident, as the character Ginshirō Yamaoka. In 1980, the novel was adapted into both a TBS Radio drama special, with Ken Takakura portraying the character, and a Yomiuri TV Thursday golden drama Fear! Panic!! Man-Eating Bear: The Greatest Tragedy in History - Brown Bear Storm (恐怖！パニック!! 人喰熊 史上最大の惨劇 羆嵐), with the character portrayed by Rentarō Mikuni.