Abstract
The ancestors of both the Japanese monkey (Macaca fuscata) and humans (Homo sapiens) arrived in the Japanese archipelago during the Pleistocene epoch. Thus, humans and monkeys have lived together in Japan for more than 35,000 years. This chapter sketches out the historical transformations in this long and fraught relationship between the people and monkeys of Japan in an attempt to identify a few crucial values that we believe have characterized the intimate yet conflicted attitude of the Japanese people toward a fellow primate species with which they share a habitat. From the neolithic, monkeys were hunted for food or were venerated for their spiritual powers. Today, monkeys have become subjects of scientific research into their natural ecology as well as for the management of their populations. While nature conservation policy may be mainly the work of scientists and the government, it is important that Japanese people continue their relationship with monkeys as neighbors with their own personalities, based on a culture of “anthropomorphized personalities.” The solutions to wildlife issues need to be formulated within the cultural context of each place where humans and primates coexist.
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Acknowledgments
This chapter was originally prepared by Y. Mito and D. S. Sprague for the symposium titled “Japanese Monkeys and the Japanese People: History and Issues in Japanese Monkey Conservation,” held at the XXIII Congress of the International Primatological Society, in Kyoto, Japan, in September 2010. We thank the members of the Conservation Committee of the Primate Society of Japan, especially Dr. T. Oi, for organizing the symposium. Finally, we thank Dr. Oi and an anonymous reviewer for their many useful comments of an earlier draft.
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Mito, Y., Sprague, D.S. (2013). The Japanese and Japanese Monkeys: Dissonant Neighbors Seeking Accommodation in a Shared Habitat. In: Radhakrishna, S., Huffman, M., Sinha, A. (eds) The Macaque Connection. Developments in Primatology: Progress and Prospects, vol 43. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3967-7_3
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