Bear Damage, Natural Rights, Self-Defense, and Armament

When people saw the news that bears had appeared in town, they first viewed it as an anomaly of nature. But a bear is not merely an animal. It is a black shadow rising from the fissures of the system, an "exception" that has walked out from a place where the law does not reach. The bear does not fear the law. It does not know municipal boundaries and does not understand the legitimacy of the state. The bear arrives in the form of "something the state has not anticipated."

When people are attacked, eaten, and have their homes invaded by bears, the question is finally asked: Who will shoot? Who will protect this life? The police are dispatched, but they do not shoot. Instead, they obstruct.
The Self-Defense Forces announced they would not fire.
The enforcers of the law say, "We cannot shoot." But all the while, lives are being taken. Faced with a bear that has appeared in a residential area, the state remains silent, saying only, "We cannot act if we follow the system."

This means the absence of sovereignty. Sovereignty is the one who decides in a state of exception. If one remains within the framework of the system, that is not sovereignty. That is procedure. As Hobbes said, the state is an entity that has monopolized violence from the people on the condition that it protects their lives. But now, that contract has been broken. The state possesses the violence, but it is not used. Lives are being taken, but the system does not move.

At this moment, the legitimacy of violence slides to another place. It falls into the hands of those who go into the mountains to track the bears—the hunters' association. Or, to the residents who raise their voices to protect their lives. Those who shoot are the ones who protect, and those are the ones who bear sovereignty. In Schmittian terms, if the state does not decide, sovereignty does not exist there. Sovereignty becomes a void, and whoever fills that void becomes the new sovereign.

Even if the system maintains its form, it is now hollow. Bear damage is an event that has made this visible. There was once a trust that the center would protect lives. But now, the center is silent, and the system does not protect the residents. The situation where Akita Prefecture requests the deployment of the Self-Defense Forces is a clear manifestation of the structure: "If the state will not act, we will." And when even the Self-Defense Forces stop at "we will not fire," the spearhead of sovereignty descends further down to the local level.

Thus, the bear is no longer just a wild animal. The bear is a symbol of the "outside" that the state has been pretending not to see, an existence that blurs the limits of the system. Lives the state does not protect, bullets the state does not fire. Then who protects, and who shoots? The ones who received that question are no longer the National Diet, but the people living at the foot of the mountains.

In this structure, sovereignty does not appear as something "delegated" by the state, but as something that "falls" along with the responsibility to protect life. The fact that the state is not functioning causes sovereignty to drop onto the scene. This is not the end of the system, but the quickening of a new order generated by the inversion of the system's strata. What was revealed by the appearance of the bears was not the collapse of the system, but the truth of the structure.

Now, what is being questioned by the system is not its "ability to protect life." It is the single point of whether it has the "will to protect life." The state of exception that is the bear is a mirror that instantly strips away the illusion of the state, bringing to the surface the true governing subject behind the system. What emerges there may not be a law or a parliament, but a single hunter walking the mountains.
Or perhaps it is one of the citizens of Akita Prefecture who never dreamed of taking up a gun until now.
However, I will stop at pointing out the structure.
"I declare that the people of Hokkaido, the Tohoku region, and especially Akita Prefecture, possess the power of self-defense and armament based on natural rights and self-defense."