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.