Monkey Business

"Those monkeys were like angels," recalls Tamotsu Ueda, former mayor of Oita, Japan. It was an April day in 1958, and Emperor Hirohito himself had come with his Empress to visit Mount Takasaki Natural Monkey Park. When the monarch set foot in the park, some 500 monkeys, as if on cue, spilled out of the woods to welcome him. One affable creature even jumped up on the Empress's shoulder.

The monkeys proved such a tourist attraction that in the next decade some 30 other Japanese cities opened similar parks. There have always been a certain number of macaque monkeys hiding in the forests of Japan, but those forests are steadily being cut down, and it proved easy to lure the monkeys into parks by establishing feeding stations close to city outskirts. As the animals took to their new habitats they also became bolder--and they kept multiplying. Now there are some 50,000 of them, and they have become a national nuisance.

The Japanese have even coined a word for the problem: engai. meaning monkey pollution. "These apes are just like furyo [juvenile delinquents]," says Kunihiko Shirai of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. "Like the human furyo, they're creating trouble in many rural communities."

The loudest complaints are coming from farmers. Fuki Moki, 48, whose ancestral patch of land lies near Mount Takago Natural Monkey Park south of Tokyo, says that the macaques wreak havoc in his onions and beans. "They also tear up my mushrooms and throw them around just for the hell of it --without even trying to eat them." Moki's next-door neighbor, Haruji Kenmoto, 65, estimates that engai damage cost him $6,000 last year. "Sometimes they even come indoors and bare their teeth at the children," he says. "It scares the daylights out of them." One macaque climbed up on Kenmoto's roof and pushed at his chimney until it broke.

Killing macaques is against Japan's game laws, but some rascally beasts in Kyoto almost lost their hides after they invaded several souvenir shops and stole chocolates. The shopkeepers set up a vigilante organization to hunt them down. Some local scientists persuaded a group of visiting Americans to open a monkey park of their own, however, and so 124 of the animals were shipped to Laredo, Texas.

Even when they stay in their parks, the macaques have become rather disagreeable. Half tame, half wild, they mingle with park visitors, snarl at them, and delight in running away with food packages left on benches. "Once having tasted the amenities of human society," observes Kunihiko Shirai, "they feel they must continue to have them. no matter what."

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