Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part 1 Science and nonhuman primates
- Part 2 Cultural views of nonhuman primates
- Part 3 Conservation of nonhuman primates
- 9 Monkeys, humans and politics in the Mentawai Islands: no simple solutions in a complex world
- 10 Conservation must pursue human–nature biosynergy in the era of social chaos and bushmeat commerce
- 11 A cultural primatological study of Macaca fascicularis on Ngeaur Island, Republic of Palau
- 12 Monkeys in the backyard: encroaching wildlife and rural communities in Japan
- Part 4 Government actions, local economies and nonhuman primates
- Index
12 - Monkeys in the backyard: encroaching wildlife and rural communities in Japan
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part 1 Science and nonhuman primates
- Part 2 Cultural views of nonhuman primates
- Part 3 Conservation of nonhuman primates
- 9 Monkeys, humans and politics in the Mentawai Islands: no simple solutions in a complex world
- 10 Conservation must pursue human–nature biosynergy in the era of social chaos and bushmeat commerce
- 11 A cultural primatological study of Macaca fascicularis on Ngeaur Island, Republic of Palau
- 12 Monkeys in the backyard: encroaching wildlife and rural communities in Japan
- Part 4 Government actions, local economies and nonhuman primates
- Index
Summary
Introduction
Wildlife conservation is unavoidably a major issue in Japan, a highly industrialized nation with high human population density. However, the conservation issues faced by Japan today cannot be explained as simple cases of recent habitat destruction by expanding human activity, or wildlife populations decimated by excessive hunting. The Japanese people have repeatedly reformulated their relationship with the fauna and flora of their islands. Wildlife conservation in Japan must be analyzed in the background of radical changes in the historical ecology of the Japanese archipelago.
Humans and monkeys have co-existed for much of the history of both species in the Japanese archipelago. The Japanese monkey, Macaca fuscata, is descended from an ancestral species of the macaque genus that crossed to the Japanese islands during the middle Pleistocene Epoch (Dobson and Kawamura, 1998) and spread to the three main islands of Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu, and the offshore islands of Yakushima and Tanegashima. The archeological record of Japan contains remains of monkeys in the shell mounds of the Neolithic Jomon Period (Mito and Watanabe, 1999). Throughout this time, natural resource utilization by humans has shaped monkey habitats and pressured monkey populations. Forest utilization altered the distribution and composition of the forests that constituted monkey habitats. Monkeys were often hunted. Monkeys survived, nevertheless.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Primates Face to FaceThe Conservation Implications of Human-nonhuman Primate Interconnections, pp. 254 - 272Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002
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