Sahoro Resort Bear Mountain

Sahoro Resort Bear Mountain (サホロリゾート ベア・マウンテン) is a 15-hectare fenced forest reserve at Karikachi Kogen, on Route 38 near Karikachi Pass in Shintoku, Hokkaido, billed as Japan’s first free-roaming brown bear safari park. Roughly a dozen Ezo brown bears (Ursus arctos yesoensis) — Hokkaido’s native brown bear subspecies — live and roam inside the enclosure, many of them transferred from an older bear farm, rather than being kept in cages for display.

Why It’s Interesting

Most Japanese “bear parks” put the bears in a pit or a cage; here the arrangement is flipped. Visitors ride a Bear Watching Bus — an open-topped vehicle with heavy iron bars — along a roughly 1.2 km route through the trees where the bears actually live, or walk the elevated forest walkway, a boardwalk about 370 meters long and 5 meters up, that ends at “Bear Point,” a viewing area with reinforced glass reportedly just centimeters from where a bear might wander. The park was modeled on Sweden’s Orsa Björnpark and is run by a company with decades of prior bear-park experience, and its stated mission is protecting a genetically distinct, at-risk local bear population rather than simply exhibiting it.

Best Time to Visit

Strictly seasonal: the park opens late April and closes mid-October (2026 season April 25–October 18), 9:00 AM–4:00 PM with last entry at 3:20 PM (3:00 PM in October, for earlier sunset). It closes completely for winter, when Hokkaido’s brown bears would be denning anyway. Operations can pause during storms or high wind for visitor safety.

Getting There

The park sits on Route 38 in Karikachi Kogen, about 15 minutes by car from JR Shintoku Station on the Sekisho Line — there is no direct train or bus access, so a car (rental or taxi from the station) is the practical way in. Free parking is available for around 600 vehicles.