The #1 source for news about monkeys and apes

[Dave Smith <daves AT statenet.com>]

from:

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/12/international/asia/12JAPA.html?ex=1019628705&ei=1&en=b0f7b59c5fddb418


MONKEYS OVERRUN JAPAN!

By JAMES BROOKE

April 12, 2002 


NIKKO, Japan - At a mountain highway rest stop, tourists
were browsing in a souvenir shop and lining up to ride a
red-topped gondola to a snowy peak. Suddenly, word spread
through the parking lot: a robbery. 

An intruder had jumped through the open door of a car and
was rummaging through the interior. 

Finally, the car owner offered some acceptable loot: a ripe
banana. With razor-sharp incisors slicing through peel and
fruit, the Japanese monkey bounded off. 

"There is one monkey that will sit in the road, betting
that the car will stop, then he will jump on the hood and
demand food," said Tomoaki Matsuo, a freelance television
reporter who makes his living filming monkey encounters in
this resort town 75 miles north of Tokyo. Others try to
jump through open windows of cars moving at close to 20
miles an hour. "The cars almost get into accidents," he
said. 

Monkeys are spreading across Japan, a tidy, cement-trimmed
nation more commonly associated with bullet trains than
wildlife. From a scraggly postwar population of 15,000, the
number of monkeys has increased tenfold in half a century,
reaching 150,000 today. In contrast, Japan's human
population, loath to reproduce, is expected to drop by half
this century, to 65 million. 

"If people just let the monkeys reproduce themselves, Japan
would be the archipelago of the monkeys in 2200," said
Kunio Watanabe, a professor of primate sociology at Kyoto
University. "But I don't think that Japanese are that
patient." 

Inter-primate harmony is fraying in this town, abutting
Nikko National Park, where officials print pamphlets
showing the year by year territorial advance of monkeys
from park homeland. Some mothers now drive their children
to school for fear of monkey attacks. Two years ago, Nikko
became the first town in Japan to ban the feeding of
monkeys. 

"It just gets worse and worse," complained Toki Kaneda, 60,
a resident of the Chuzenji Lake section who closed her
souvenir store because of monkey theft. "We haven't been
able to leave the windows of our second-floor rooms open
for years." 

Increasingly, officials demonize monkeys as "pests" that
"infest" farmland, causing at least $7 million crop damage
a year. Nationwide, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper estimates,
the number of monkeys killed by humans has soared over the
last 25 years to about 10,000 a year today. 

Nevertheless, like coyotes in the United States, monkey
numbers in Japan keep increasing. With monkey bands moving
from mountain areas to farm areas, their diet has improved,
allowing most adult females now to have one baby a year. 

"Is it possible to give them birth control?" Akiko Domoto,
governor of Chiba prefecture, asked in an interview, noting
that Hong Kong was starting this spring to capture and
sterilize male monkeys. "I love monkeys, but as governor I
have to do something." 

Japanese monkeys are becoming bigger and more aggressive
because of their Western diets, complains Teruo Kanaya, a
60-year-old Nikko hotelier. By rooting through garbage bags
or extorting food from tourists, he said, "they have gotten
bigger from 20 to 30 years of eating Western food,
McDonald's, greasy, fatty food." 

The monkey population explosion reflects changes in
Japanese society, including the decline of hunting and
farming. In 1960, a quarter of Japan's work force were
farmers. Today, fewer than 5 percent are. 

"Monkeys are moving into areas that are abandoned, where
there are no farmers, no dogs," said Hidenori Kusakari,
Japan conservation director for the World Wide Fund for
Nature. 

Farmers who stay behind often wonder if they are growing
vegetables only to provide monkeys with buffet salad bars.
A new book, "Protecting Mountain Fields From Monkeys,"
contains the latest in anti-monkey technology, including
electric fences and 12-foot-high nets. 

Not only has the number of Japan's hunters receded to
1960's levels, but an increasingly urban population looks
aghast at hunting monkeys. Families of hunters suffer
social ostracism. Children get teased at school if their
fathers are known to be "monkey killers." 

Still, rural villages sometimes post bounties of up to
$1,000 for the leader of a particularly destructive monkey
troop. In cities, sensational news reports about monkeys
"molesting women and children" have stirred police officers
to form monkey posses, patrolling streets with nets and
bananas tied to poles.