[7] As recalled by a friend and colleague Kim Heacox, Hoshino respected nature and all beings so much that ‘practically bowed before clicking the shutter’.
[8] Hoshino died after being mauled by a brown bear in Kurile Lake on the Kamchatka Peninsula in eastern Russia on August 8, 1996.
[9] In early August 1996, Michio Hoshino flew to the South Kamchatka Federal Wildlife Reserve accompanied by three Japanese cameramen who were making a documentary film about the photographer.
The local bear expert and a researcher of the Kamchatka Nature Management Department of the Pacific Institute of Geography Igor Revenko was assigned to guide the group.
Despite his extensive experience of living in the wild, Hoshino disregarded basic safety rules and pitched his tent next to the hunting lodge where the rest of the team were sleeping.
During the night, a bear approached the tent, unmistakably identified (probably by the breathing of a sleeping person) where the man's head was, and killed him with a single blow through the canvas.
A colleague photographer Nick Jans recalled that Hoshino only smiled at warnings and was completely sure that ‘all creatures would sense his own good intentions and respond in kind’.
[11] Meanwhile, the helicopter pilots said that Michio Hoshino refused to participate in the drinking party at the lodge and, unable to endure the snoring of the "representative of the reserve", according to their version of the state inspector, went to sleep in the tent.
[17] Lynn Schooler's book The Blue Bear relates the story of the author's friendship with Hoshino, a man he admired greatly for his skill as a photographer and his humanity.