Two Kinds of Bear in Autumn: Americans Vote for the Fattest, Japanese Search for "A Bear Got into the Yard"
On 22 September the polls opened for "Fat Bear Week" at Katmai National Park in Alaska, USA. People around the world can vote online, picking the brown bear that put on fat most successfully this year out of a whole field — this year's bracket was released on 18 September, voting runs until 29 September with no voting at the weekend, and the champion is announced that day.
At almost the same moment, Japan's trending searches were about a different kind of bear: which street a bear had appeared on again.
One bear gets voted into stardom, another makes people close their windows. Both are in fact saying the same plain thing: autumn is here, time to stock up.
The Bear's Half
The brown bears of Katmai have to get through several months of hibernation without eating or drinking. So every year from July to September, their entire job is eating — the salmon-run season is also the busiest time of their year. The park's stated reason for holding this vote is to celebrate how well they do at "preparing for hibernation". In other words, it is a competition in which humans vote but the outcome is decided entirely by the bears' own body weight.
The Japanese figures tell a different story: autumn (September to November) is the peak of bear sightings, and in a lean year they will search all the way into the places where people live. In other words, the bears have not "turned vicious", they "have not eaten enough" — the harvest of nuts such as beech and mizunara oak decides whether they come down from the mountains.
The Human Half
The ancients wrote this very briefly. The Monthly Ordinances and the Seventy-Two Seasonal Indicators Explained (Yueling Qishi'er Hou Jijie) discusses the three hou of the autumn equinox, one of which is "dormant insects seal their burrows" — insects begin to close up the mouth of their burrows little by little, getting ready for winter. The old commentary sets it out in more detail:
To pi is to build up the mouth of its hibernation burrow a little, so that the opening through which light comes in becomes a little smaller; when the cold grows severe, it is plastered shut.
One word — "sealing" — says everything autumn has to do: what comes in comes in, what should be shut is shut.
What we do today is really the same set of things: put the seasonal clothes away, service the heating, bring the pickle jars out, work out how much this winter is going to cost. In the solar-term system, most of the "suitable" and "avoid" entries also revolve around "gathering" and "storing" — and this is the part of Huangli Date Selection: Where the Suitable and Avoid Lines Come From that is easier to overlook: it is not only choosing days, it is reminding you of the rhythm of the seasons.
And seen from the angle of the four pillars, the word "storing" has a place: winter corresponds to the three months of "hai, zi and chou", the stretch where the water element is heaviest among the month orders, and in BaZi Basics: Four Pillars, Ten Gods, Patterns and the Useful Element, any discussion of the relation between the useful element and the month order has to pass through this "storing".
Closing
After looking at the Fat Bear Week voting page, a friend asked me: "Which one are you voting for?" I said I was voting for the one that gained the most weight — this is probably one of the very few competitions where "effort gets results". He was not convinced, and asked: "What about the bear in Japan?" I said that one is not a competition, it is an exam: the abundance or failure of the nut crop sets the questions, and it is only the one answering them.
Information current as of 23 September 2026 (China Standard Time).
Sources
- US National Park Service (2026-09-11): Fat Bear Week 2026 (bracket released 18 September, voting 22–29 September with none at the weekend, champion revealed 29 September)
- Japan's Ministry of the Environment: Conservation and Management of Wild Birds and Animals (the official gateway for クマ sighting preliminary figures)
- Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute: causes of mass irruptions of the ツキノワグマ (mast abundance and failure) — institution name and conclusion kept as in the main text; that institution's site is unreachable from the current network environment, so no clickable link is given
- Monthly Ordinances and the Seventy-Two Seasonal Indicators Explained (Yueling Qishi'er Hou Jijie), Wu Cheng, Yuan dynasty; Wikisource — the autumn equinox's three hou, "the second hou: dormant insects seal their burrows", and its old commentary
- Google Trends search rankings (Japan, 23 September 2026, 24-hour window; a platform magnitude estimate, not an exact search volume)
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