The Japanese photographer Michio Hoshino was no stranger to bears. In 1978, he left Japan for Alaska, where he pursued his dream of photographing the most remote landscapes and rawest wildlife he could find. On countless trips into the deepest parts of the Alaskan interior and its many islands, he captured caribou, grey whales, golden eagles and Alaska’s famous grizzly bears, even publishing a photobook on the bears. If anyone was at home in wild places, it was Hoshino. 

In The Traveling Tree, a collection of essays written in the mid-1990s and now elegantly translated into English for the first time by the novelist Eli K P William, Hoshino talks of the ‘feeling of primal tension forgotten by humankind’ aroused by the presence of bears: ‘When traveling through the Alaskan wilderness, you always sense the presence of bears out there somewhere, even if you don’t encounter them.’ 

Hoshino’s death was a tragic irony. In 1996, he was on a group expedition to eastern Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula to make a documentary about brown bears for a Japanese TV network. For whatever reason, he forsook the crew’s hut on Kurile Lake and bedded down in his tent for the