Autumn is peak season for human-wildlife conflict in Japan. Most of the time, precautions to reduce the risk of human-wildlife conflict are non-threatening. Risk is normally reduced through changes in human behavior, such as wearing bear bells when hiking in the woods or making sure to take care of the disposal of garbage.

Sometimes, however, people take more extreme measures to control risk, especially on the edges of community boundaries where there is a lot of cross-border traffic between humans and wildlife.

As a voluntary border patrol, hunters in Japan have traditionally been called on to protect their communities from invading animals that make life difficult for humans and their animal companions.

There are plenty of examples of animals that are marked as pests once they move into human communities from the mountains. Megafauna get the most attention. While they might be considered "charismatic" in other sites of human-animal interaction, like petting zoos or national parks, the closer they move into the sites of interaction that are marked for human habitation, the more likely these large mammals are going to lose their sex appeal. Wild boar, deer, monkeys and bears are unwanted animals that are frequently "removed" from human environments in the name of pest control, and they get the most national and local press.

The first hunting law, the 1918 Wildlife Protection and Hunting Law, allowed hunting that contributed to "the improvement of the human living environment." This law allowed for the killing of "big game" animals like wild boar and bear as "pests." It even cross-listed some "pests" like crows as "game."

Recently, I have become fascinated with the reactions to smaller animals that "invade" communities, and the ways in which these animals are "managed" as "pests" and "game" by hunters in Japan. While hunters that patrol for bears and wild boar get more national press, I am more interested with the less celebrated, but no less dangerous, border control work that is done by suzumebachi hunters.

Suzumebachi, or giant Japanese hornets, are my great white sharks. They fascinate me and terrify me. Having been stung countless times by hornets in Canada, I am a bit skittish around them. My reaction to seeing a hornet the size of a sparrow for the first time was predictable. I froze, feeling fear and fascination. Measuring 5 cm and packing enough venom to put a healthy person in the hospital, suzumebachi have never failed to catch my undivided attention.

I can understand the allure of dragonfly watching as an object of the coming of autumn or the ways in which beetle hunting is promoted as a summer bonding activity for boys and their fathers, but I can think of much better things to do on an autumn day than hunting a bug like the suzumebachi that has the potential to put me in an emergency room. Anything that dangerous is worth admiring, but from a safe distance.

So watching people take on hornets in broad daylight makes me shake my head in disbelief.

Suzumebachi hunting makes good viewing and I can't remember an autumn without a news story on the heroics of one of these hunts. What viewers are treated to is something that could be labeled an elaborate form of hunting, an extreme sport. Once the hunters track the hornets to their nest, they attack the suzumebachi head-on with smoke bombs, bug spray, shovels and occasionally a vacuum cleaner. Victorious, the spoils are exhibited to the community. The nest is taken back home as a trophy to be put on display, and the hornet larva are sauteed and eaten by the hunting team.

Much of the meaning of the performance hunt is lost on me. But I am amazed at how choreographed the ritual of the hunt seems. Finding and disposing of a nest is filled with the theater of a hunt. There is the chase. There is the hunt. And then there is the post-hunt feast. Do larva taste gamey?

But what's the point, aside from the sport of the hunt? While suzumebachi are dangerous and a number of people in Japan die from stings each year, the lengths that people will go to destroy a nest seems disproportional to the physical damage that they do to communities.

Perhaps the hunt is more about boundary management than anything else and that there is a perception that the hornets are evidence of the community's inability to protect itself from the encroachment of the wild into its territory.

For someone living in the city, this may seem strange. There is the idea that the inverse is happening. But when the increase of animal border crossings is juxtaposed against the rural depopulation, the extreme measures that people will go to remove this "pest" is a little more understandable.

The writer lives in Japan and is completing his Ph.D. in history.