Monkey Japanese Film
Mariu Carlton
I love photographing snow monkeys, and I love leading my annual winter wonderland Hokkaido photo tour. But February is not my favorite time to film or photograph the snow monkeys. It's cold, and the monkeys have less food and are naturally less active. But in the winter, you can catch the possing zen monkeys; also, in recent years, we have had fewer cold days due to climate change, so the monkeys have been more active, but it's not mating season. Mating season is in the autumn October into December when snow blankets the ground. Japanese male macaques reach sexual maturity from 5 to 6 years of age and females from 4 to 5 years of age. Interestingly close to 99% of people from outside Japan only know one place to see our wild Japanese snow monkeys, and that's in Jigokudani Monkey Park. In the Jigokudany region, there are about 300 monkeys who live in three different monkey troops and several smaller raiding parties. Across Japan, there are over one hundred thousand wild monkeys. The Japanese Macaque occurs in most of Japan except for the southern Island chain, and in Hokkaido, the monkeys do not occur due to climate which is similar to Alaska. It would be next to impossible for the world's most northern living wild nonhuman primate to survive there. In Kanagawa, next to Tokyo, where my primary home and office are nestled in the countryside, the monkeys often climb over my house and raid our local gardens. I will never forget one summer day a few years back when I was entertaining friends and clients at my home having a bbq, and a Japanese Macaque ran across my front yard carrying a Chinese cabbage like it was a football. Oh, to this day, I have never seen anything like it, but you can be sure I always have a camera ready on bbq days just in case. In Kanagawa, and most mountain ranges across Japan live hundreds of monkeys in various troops. Most monkey troops have between 30-70 monkeys, and they have a strongly hierarchical society where every monkey holds a position, any more than 70 monkeys would be impossible for the Alpha and his sentries and governors to control. Often disobedient monkeys to the troop are chased away, and they start their own troop.
Mating season is amazing to capture the true untold stories of these monkeys; their faces glow in bright reds, and tempers run high with monkeys moving around quickly and often chasing their partners down. And please remember, these are wild monkeys, and if you visit during the mating season, be extra vigilant not to upset the macaques or stare down any monkeys, I guarantee you will more than likely be hissed at, or possibly they will lunge forward at you, showing their dominance.
In the coming weeks, I will be in the backcountry highlands of Niigata, Japan photographing camping hiking for about two weeks with hot natural wild hot springs in the area, and it's where several hundred monkeys call home.
Camera's I used for the image on this newsletter is by Nikon I either the D850 or the D6. Lenses either Nikon AF-S NIKKOR 180-400mm f/4E TC1.4 FL ED VR or Nikon AF-S NIKKOR 800mm f/5.6E FL ED VR.
AF-S TELECONVERTER TC800-1.25E ED or I used the Sigma 120-300mm F2.8 DG OS HSM Sports.
Camera settings for action shots are generally about 1/2000sec, f/11, ISO 500, or higher depending on lightings; my camera mode is on Aperture or sometimes manual.
Her name was Pelka. She was ten years old and recently had a baby. I was at La Moca reporting on a story for the Daily Texan about the first-ever roundup of a troop of macaques that had been transplanted in 1972 from their sanctuary in the snowy, pine-shaded peaks of Stormy Mountain (Arashiyama in Japanese), outside of Kyoto, to the most unlikely of places: this sun-strobed ranch near Laredo. Pelka and I were surrounded by volunteers with laps full of sleepy monkeys. A couple dozen of the 176 resident macaques had been captured and tranquilized so that researchers could examine, inoculate, and tattoo them. We were keeping our charges safe until they had recovered enough to be released back into the electric-fenced, 108-acre enclosure, where the rest of the troop roamed freely.
With watermelon-hued faces haloed by tawny fur, the Macaca fuscata is the only primate besides man that can endure extreme cold. Although the average lifespan of a snow monkey in the wild is 6.3 years, some have been known to live as long as 32 years. They stand around two feet tall when they rear up bipedally; males typically weigh about 25 pounds and females 18. So cherished were these primates by the Japanese that, in 1947, they became a protected species.
And then, like Pelka, my family was rudely transplanted from the Land of the Rising Sun to the Land of the Roasting Sun. I never expected to encounter snow monkeys again. When I ended up at UT and heard about this roundup of Japanese macaques, naturally I rushed to volunteer. And now, on a patch of dry, sandy rangeland, my childhood dream was coming true.
The national treasures had become public nuisances. Unless a new home was found, the 150 rogue monkeys would become candidates for either lab studies or the dissection table. When no takers could be found in Japan, a five-alarm alert went up throughout the international community to save these members of the only group of primates whose behavior and matrilineal lines had been studied for over a decade. For six years, scientists around the globe searched for a safe home for the endangered monkeys.
A cold winter and a lot of insecticide took care of the screwworms. The coyotillo, rattlers, birds of prey, and bobcats were another story. After a period of mutual puzzlement, the bobcats discovered the food value of a Japanese macaque and abducted three infants. Human intervention via a shotgun neutralized that threat. Following the deaths of several of their compatriots from snake bites, the troop, in a remarkable example of adaptation, developed a special alarm call for the slithering threat. No further rattler deaths were recorded.
Again a five-alarm alert was raised. This time it went out not just to primatologists, but to animal lovers around the country. Among those who heeded the call was Newton, who choppered in to perform a benefit concert that raised $40,000. The money was used to help purchase a more secure permanent home for the troop, a few miles off I-35, outside of Millett.
Other footage of her that I find includes a 1997 National Geographic film documenting how she had supervised the move of the monkeys to the more secure enclosure in Millett. It describes how primatologists and students from around the world would continue their observations and every animal would be known, its genealogy traced back to Japan.
With two children to support, Griffin went to work for the local school system. A bout with long COVID-19 has recently slowed work toward her doctorate. To this day, the pain of her exile remains so acute that she cut all ties with the troop and knows almost nothing about the current management.
In the intervening decades, however, as those wilds began to disappear, we all had a little rethink about the multitudinous ways in which we as a species have flubbed up our dominion of the Earth and all her creatures thereupon. We began to call pets our animal companions. In November 2018 a writ of habeas corpus was filed on behalf of an elephant named Happy that petitioned for her release from the Bronx Zoo. If Happy had prevailed, she would, in essence, have been granted personhood.
Where, then, within this schema of our evolving consciousness about animal rights, did Pelka and her troopmates fit? I wonder if bringing the snow monkeys to Texas had been the right thing in the first place, and what their future looks like today. It would be hard to find anyone more qualified to address these questions than Liz Tyson, the programs director for Born Free USA and director of the sanctuary. A 41-year-old Brit with a doctorate in animal welfare law, she made arguments before Parliament that aided the passage, in 2019, of a law banning the use of wild animals in traveling circuses in England.
Beyond the quarantine area, a lagoon of a puddle covers the red dirt road with a mirror image of the Prussian blue clouds threatening rain as they rush in to clot up the sky. On the other side of the upside-down sky is a fifteen-foot fence enclosing 175 acres of Johnson grass, mesquite, and acacia, all an uncharacteristically luxurious green.
Our tour is abruptly truncated by an ending too clichd for Hollywood: big, fat, road-flooding drops start to pour down. It behooves me to hit the trail before that trail becomes impassable. With the red dirt gullies quickly filling, I turn onto the paved safety of I-35 with one question churning through my mind: What, in the end, had a half century of snow monkeys in Texas been?
What answer would Pelka 65 have given me? Would she have chosen to sentence her offspring to lives of endless captivity in a world as hot as it was hostile? Or would she have chosen for them never to have existed at all?
In the late 1950s, a local hiker and nature lover named Sogo Hara noticed that the displaced macaques from the nearby mountains started raiding the nearby farms. Their troublesome behavior left the farmers no choice, but to hunt them. In an effort to protect the monkeys, Hara and the owner of the Korakukan ryokan began luring the monkeys away from the farm towards the inn in Jigokudani Valley.
Since the bath was still used by guests of the ryokan, for hygienic reasons, a separate bathing area was needed for the monkeys. The ensuing collective efforts of the many invested parties led to the construction of the Jigokudani Monkey Park in 1964, just across the river from the Korakukan ryokan. They built a separate bathing hot spring for the monkeys at the park and started feeding them here.
The snow monkeys international fame they made the cover of LIFE magazine on January 30, 1970. The photographs, taken by renowned wildlife photographer Kojo Tanaka, captured the serene and almost human-like expressions of the monkeys, much to the delight of readers worldwide.
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