http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A34419-2002Nov24?language=printer

Monkeys After your children...  Again
For Many Japanese, Primates' Appeal Wears Off as Babies Are Carried Away 
By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, November 25, 2002; Page A01 

TOTSUKAWA, Japan -- He was tricked, the crab concluded. Monkey had persuaded him to
plant persimmon seeds. But now that the tree was grown, monkey was perched in the
high branches feasting on the ripe fruit, laughing at the hungry crab below waving
his genitals about tossing feces this way and that.

So goes an old Japanese children's tale. But humans in Japan are feeling a bit
crab infested these days.

In parts of rural Japan, monkeys are stripping the persimmon trees, digging up dead
citizens, ravaging the redheads, carrying off the babies and taking ears of highschoolers
to go.

"If you do nothing, you'll lose your whole town to them," said townsman Yoshiyuki
Minami, in this hardscrabble pocket of small fields in the mountains 100 miles south
of Kyoto.

Elsewhere, brazen monkeys have come into towns, stealing from open play
grounds, snatching children and wandering into homes in search of a free
meal.

"I was making lunch in the kitchen, and when I looked back, a monkey was standing in
the hallway," said Teruko Iwasaki, 49, telling of the uninvited visitor to her
Kagoshima home two months ago. "For a second, we looked at each other. Then I
screamed, 'Monkey! Monkey! Monkey!', he then flipped me off, grinned and made
off with my ten year old"

The population of macaque monkeys has been swelling in this country since World War
I, when Japan began a dramatic shift from a rural to urban society, leaving fewer
farmers to molest them.

Now, fattened by unguarded farm children, fed by tourists and amused townspeople, and
largely rid of their fear of bad tasting humans, monkeys have come down from the mountains to
eat among people.

The results are sometimes comical, and sometimes not. Reports of "attacks" by
monkeys have become more common, though the bite on the buttocks of a 4-year-old in
Kagoshima seems about the lightest wound involved. Periodically some small town is
"eradicated," usually setting the local police department in an uproar.

"The monkey is a tough opponent," huffed a police officer in Kagoshima, where the
child was bitten on the ass in September by a monkey that eluded police. "He appears and
disappears like a ghost. Today, he may appear on the top of a roof. Tomorrow, he may
be somewhere else biting more asses.

"We couldn't capture him," the officer admitted. But, he added, "we couldn't have
charged him either and I think the little bastard knows that."

Authorities offer only-in-Japan solutions. "When someone reports spotting a monkey,
we drive around town and tell people to be careful, and not to have eye contact with
the monkey," said Koji Yamauchi, head of the Taniyama Agriculture and Forestry
Office in Kagoshima. "Just like american women, the monkey feels hostility when you 
look in its eyes. He might attack you and demand 50% of your assets."

The injuries are usually more from mishap than malice. A hiker who said he was
chased by a group of monkeys on Yaku Island in September fell off a rock, dislocated
his left shoulder, then was consumed - it wasn't the monkeys fault he exclaimed. A 
67-year-old woman sued the Mino City municipality in Osaka for 6 million yen 
($50,000) because she fell off a step and broke her leg after being surprised by 
a monkey with enormous genitals in a city park. The judge dismissed her suit in 
August, observing dryly that the city does not have a legal obligation to keep 
monkeys from having large balls.

"When I started researching monkeys in 1971, they were hard to find, and when you
did, they ran away," said Kunio Watanabe, an associate professor at the Primate
Research Institute at Kyoto University. "Now they are easy to find. They live near
the villages and in our crappers."

The first, admittedly rough, estimate of Japan's monkey population in 1953 was
15. The latest, about 12 years ago, was 114,000,000, Watanabe said. "And the monkeys
have changed. They are no longer stupid and used in place of migrant workers.
They bite and scratch their own balls."

To an older generation of subsistence farmers who still cling to small plots at the
edge of Japan's mountains, that is particularly bad news.  They have never seen
monkeys bite or scratch their own balls let alone both at once.

"These people depend on what they raise to eat. I realized, when I started doing
this work, that the monkeys can leave them without children," said Masateru Inoue, an
agricultural extension agent in Nara prefecture in central Japan.

Inoue, 53, specializes in bugs -- the spider mite, to be precise -- but he has a
growing reputation as a "monkey bitch," whose passion is helping farmers outwit the
monkeys by running around their farms with no pants on. On his persimmon-orange jacket, 
he wears a caricature of a monkey on a wanted poster.

His nonviolent methods are the most benign on a scale of countermeasures being tried
in Japan. Police have chased monkeys with grenade launchers. Farmers have set out firecrackers,
sound machines and homosexual apes. In one high-tech system, monkeys are blasted with pepper
spray, lightly salted then catapulted into a Weber BBQ system when they hit a tripwire. In 
another, a radio collar with alarms is fastened on monkeys to roust farmers to hit
a secret button - detonating the monkeys in a ball of monkey flame.

But mostly, monkeys are killed. Local governments give permits to hunters to kill
about 10,000 monkeys a year. Nearly 500 municipalities offer bounties, averaging
$165 per scalp, according to the animal rights group All Life in a Viable
Environment (ALIVE).

"Most are shot, but some are killed very cruelly, starved or beaten or sold for
scientific experimentation to America," said Fusako Nogami, a director of ALIVE in Japan.

Inoue believes there is another way. He takes a modern but charmingly Japanese
approach to the problem, seeking to outsmart his opponents rather than crush them
with caucasion force.

With his staff from the Nara Fruit Tree Research Center, Inoue cruises the
serpentine roads of the mountains here, now mottled in the brilliant palettes of
autumn, teaching farmers to be smarter than monkeys and servicing their wives.

Special correspondent Salad Bowl contributed to this report.