Problematic monkeys appear to be moving into abandoned homes.
Of course, it’s great to be involved in protecting the environment, but recently I can’t shake the feeling that people in Japan are increasingly in need of being protected from the environment. Year after year, bears have been venturing deeper into inhabited and even somewhat urban areas, resulting in violence and damage. Now, monkeys are beginning to take over the streets too.
That’s the case in the town of Yugawara in Kanagawa Prefecture, where a troop of Japanese macaques has been involved in numerous incidents of assaults, loitering, theft, harassment, and vandalism throughout the once tranquil streets of this popular hot spring area.
Yugawara has had monkeys roaming around the area since 1955, but one troop in particular, dubbed “T1”, is the first to have begun acting like a bunch of juvenile delinquents. This gang of 20 simians is believed to have been responsible for 6,054 incidents in 2025 alone.
▼ A news report with numerous videos of monkeys walking around like they own the place
Last month, a man in his 40s was attacked and bitten by one, marking the first time anyone’s ever been bitten by a monkey there. It is unclear why these monkeys are suddenly turning against people, but the head of a local monkey control center believes some event in the past must have triggered their recent rash of violent, anti-social behavior.
Regardless, the animals are clearly well-accustomed to living around town. They can be seen sitting around on roadsides and aren’t even spooked by an ambulance speeding by with its siren on. Some experts suspect they’ve traded in their usual shelter of treetops for far more comfy abandoned houses on the edge of town, the result of Japan’s rampant population decline. A survey in 2024 found 433 such homes in Yugawara.
In an effort to learn more about their behavior, the monkey control center managed to attach GPS trackers to two alpha males in the troop. Using these, they’ll also be able to dispatch “monkey removal teams” who use firecrackers to shoo away the primates before they do any harm. However, given the rate at which they’ve been acclimatizing themselves, the effectiveness of this may not last long.
Yuagawara’s economy relies heavily on tourism, with visitors coming to the town for its hot springs and traditional ryokan inns, as well as orange-picking at its orchards in late autumn. But residents are worried that people will stay away for fear of their own safety against the aggressive macaques. Readers of the news online sympathized with them, and comments expressed a desire for more to be done about animal control in general.
“6,000 in one year?! And those are just the reported cases.”
“If we don’t make the monkeys fear us, both sides will suffer.”
“They’re learning that humans scare easily.”
“I was kicked in the back by one of those. I wasn’t seriously hurt, but they are crazy strong.”
“Some monkeys were causing trouble around my farm, so I got a hunter to shoot at them and they never came back. They need to be taught to fear humans.”
“At least bears hibernate in the winter.”
“If we re-introduce wolves to Japan, they can help control the population of monkeys and deer.”
I guess wolves might help, but honestly, at the rate things are going it seems very likely they’d just start attacking people and encroaching on inhabited areas too. Then we’d have bears, boars, monkeys, wolves, and the occasional escaped crocodile to deal with in our daily lives.
In the case of T1, however, if these problems persist, it’s likely they will be officially classified as an “unmanageable troop.” This means the monkeys have become irrevocably adapted to inhabited areas and require live trapping and euthanizing of members until the troop has been completely broken up.
Not an ideal solution, since they are just monkeys being monkeys, but without the proper financial support to create a way to handle problems like this, the people whose livelihoods are threatened by them will have to do what it takes to solve it.
Source: FNN Online Prime, YouTube/フジテレビ 報道【公式】
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