Between Wildness and Civilization: Miyazaki Manabu / Photographer

"Direct Talk"

Our guest today is photographer Miyazaki Manabu.

Miyazaki uses robotic cameras equipped with infrared sensors

to give us a glimpse into the elusive world of wild animals.

In recent years, many of those wild animals

have strayed beyond their natural habitats.

Masked palm civets scurrying about in Tokyo.

Deer wandering the streets of Paris.

A wild boar running loose in Rome.

A daredevil raccoon leaping onto a car in Colorado.

In the northern Japanese city of Sapporo,

brown bear attacks have become a serious problem requiring urgent attention.

Miyazaki has trained his camera on the intersection of human society

and wildlife for close to 50 years.

He shares his thoughts on how we can coexist with wild animals.

Human beings don't know anything at all about animals, and we don't care to know.

Humans have forgotten something, but the animals, they remember.

And they know much better than we do

just how careless and indifferent human beings can be.

Crows building a nest using pieces of electric wire.

A monkey having a sip of a discarded canned coffee.

A hermit crab that's traded its shell for a squeeze bottle cap.

Miyazaki has spent his career capturing moments like these.

In August 2022, he was in Hokkaido, Japan.

He'd come to photograph in the mountains by this rural farm.

A fence had been put up to keep wild animals

from coming down and ravaging the fields.

Yet this fence had a hole.

Miyazaki set up one of his special unmanned cameras in position.

That night,

the camera captured a deer casually strolling through to the other side.

Fences get torn open by bears, or maybe a deer gets its antlers

caught and creates an opening as it struggles to get free.

They realize they can now get through, and then other animals start to use it.

It's interesting how there are things that the animals notice

that human beings fail to notice.

There was even a stray cat that passed through that hole.

Miyazaki also captured something unexpected

with a video camera he'd positioned nearby.

There was a bear chasing a deer as if it were a lion.

Bears eat deer, you know.

They hunt their own prey.

It seems to me wild animals are out there savoring life.

They're living their lives.

So it's ridiculous for humans to pity them

or to say they lack food based on our standards.

The animals are living life as they see fit.

They're living their happiest lives.

If anything, it's humans that live a constrictive existence.

Miyazaki was born in 1949

in a region of Nagano Prefecture bordered by the Japan Alps.

Growing up, he had a fondness for birds and other animals,

and even built his own pigeon loft.

At 16, he began working for a lens manufacturer,

which was his first exposure to cameras.

I got to handle these cameras I couldn't afford.

I picked one up and started shooting, and quickly became obsessed.

It was fascinating, and so I decided to do something with it.

As a kid, I was quick to learn to identify birds by their song.

I could tell the difference between a hundred bird types.

So I decided that's the direction I would take in my photography.

At 20, Miyazaki quit his job and set off across the country.

He devoted his time fully to taking photos of eagles,

hawks and other birds of prey.

He became the first person to photograph

all 16 species of birds of prey known to be in Japan.

The resulting book garnered him a prestigious Japanese photography award.

But he found the presence of a camera put animals on edge,

making it difficult to capture candid moments.

Basically, you're there waiting determined to get the shot,

and the animals can feel it in the air.

They can sense your intent.

How could he photograph animals without making them aware of his presence?

He tested different methods.

Eventually, he devised a camera

that could be triggered with an infrared motion sensor.

Miyazaki set up his camera along a footpath.

It captured passersby during the day,

and wild animals at night.

Even a group of bears.

No one was taking photos like that.

I wanted to use my camera to reveal an unseen world, the world at night.

Miyazaki has made documenting the intersection of wildness

and civilization his life's work.

There are these giant kite's nests.

And when you climb up to take a look, you see things like bras and gloves.

I once saw one with about seven gloves.

Another time, I came across a nest made with lots of plastic twine,

and a nest made using fishing line.

I thought, these birds are pretty clever.

They're resourceful.

He's made other surprising discoveries along the way.

In Japan, it's common to sprinkle roads with calcium chloride

to melt snow in winter.

Miyazaki was able to catch wild deer licking meltwater under a highway.

We're talking about a synthetic salt, a mineral.

I had a feeling the animals might like it.

So I used my robotic camera to try to capture them in the act,

and I noticed lots of deer coming to the roadside.

Salt is something the deer need to live.

So as they lick those things year after year,

the male deer end up producing more and more offspring,

and their population grows.

Birds and other animals are adapting to civilization.

I had to explore this fascinating theme.

Wild boars rummaging through discarded mandarin oranges,

just one of many candid photos Miyazaki has taken of wild animals

adapting to human civilization.

He frequently travels to Hokkaido,

where in recent years brown bear sightings have become a regular occurrence.

On this trip, he chose to set up his camera in a woody area

close to a national highway.

During the day, it's a path for hikers

and those who've come to forage for edible plants.

(- What's wrong?)
- It happened again!

My camera's been hit.

Bear cub, most likely.

His robotic camera had been destroyed.

I see claw marks.

Here and here.

Claw marks.

The culprit had left a tell-tale sign.

This is barely standing. What power!

This footage showed a man walking by.

Then, not too far behind, a deer.

And then...

If a bear comes across someone that's provoked it in the past,

it'll likely go after them.

But if you're just some random person,

the bear doesn't know you so it'll simply try to avoid you.

That's how they tend to behave.

Bears have paws that are a lot like cat's paws.

They have pads that make their footsteps very quiet,

so most people won't even notice the presence of bears.

The Hokkaido prefectural government estimates

that the brown bear population has roughly doubled over the past 30 years.

Experts point to the prefectural government's 1990 decision

to stop the annual spring culling of brown bears

in response to global biodiversity efforts.

Rural depopulation also means that there are fewer and fewer mountain villages.

Wild animal populations are exploding all across Japan right now.

The reason is, for hundreds of years, even thousands of years,

Japanese society has been built using trees from mountain forests.

Our food supply, everything, was powered by firewood, the trees.

But then 70 years ago, Japan shifted its energy source

to electricity, gas and petroleum.

So we stopped taking from our forests.

Even pencil-thin trees will grow to be big and wide after 70 years.

Of course there are more animals.

There are more places for them to live.

Animals will naturally spring up wherever there are mountains.

And it used to be the same as us catching fish in rivers or in the sea.

We ate those animals for the protein.

We set up traps, like, covered pits and such.

But in modern society, we strive for efficiency.

We keep large numbers of chickens in cages, and same for pigs and cows.

And we pay for the convenience of being able to buy their meat at a local store.

So we hardly hunt anymore.

And because of that, Japan is crawling with wild animals.

Cases of wild animals entering human settlements

are also on the rise in other parts of the world.

Wild animals are venturing more and more into human habitats.

And there's a reason for that.

Take bears. As cubs develop in their mother's womb,

they're exposed to the sounds of trucks passing by on the highway,

airplanes roaring in the sky.

They're learning.

These baby animals are conditioned since before birth.

So they come into the streets unafraid of humans.

And they're aware of our blind spots.

Come nighttime, most people are indoors.

They watch TV and go to bed.

The animals know this.

So they sneak into town at night when people won't notice.

They've really done their homework.

What does Miyazaki think is the next step

if humans are to coexist with wildlife?

The animals have already figured humans out,

so now it's our turn to learn more about animals.

In order to gather and compile all that knowledge,

we need people from different walks of life to speak up,

and we need to be willing to listen.

When you share knowledge and teach people something new,

they start to internalize it.

And then in turn, they start to look at the world in a different way.

So you need to keep repeating that process.

Looking ahead, I believe we have to change peoples' values.

How has his five-decade career shaped his outlook on life?

I take issue when people think of humans and wildlife as separate things,

in separate terms.

Think about it.

We humans have been allowed to live on this planet.

It's just the same for raccoon dogs, foxes and bears.

So all living things are tenants of the Earth.

And to think of humans and animals as being separate is pure folly on our part.

It's just faulty thinking.

The animals know that we're all in the same boat.

Humans don't get it.

We think we're better.

We look down on them.

Our landlord isn't going to like that.

We might end up getting kicked out.

So we have to change our behavior.

That's my perspective.