Animal · Japan
Japanese macaque
Macaca fuscata — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The Japanese macaque lives further north than any other wild monkey, in Japanese mountain forests that lie deep under snow all winter. Its thick coat and round body hold the heat in. People also call it the snow monkey.
Picture credit: Lorie Shaull (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Fg2 (Public domain) · Yiannis Theologos Michellis (CC0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the Japanese macaque live?
Home: Forests and mountains in Japan.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Japan.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: about 55 cm tall, about 8 to 11 kg. It weighs about 10 kilograms. On the menu: both plants and meat.
The story behind it
Japanese macaques live in troops that can hold a few dozen animals or several hundred. They know one another well, sit for hours picking through each other’s fur, and argue about food and rank. Winter is the hard part of the year: the air can drop to about minus twenty degrees, and the monkeys get by on bark, buds, evergreen leaves and whatever they can dig out of the snow. In the Jigokudani valley in central Japan, one troop learned to sit in a hot spring to stay warm. It began in the 1960s, after monkeys watched people bathing, and young animals copied the older ones until the habit was passed down the generations. Only a few mountain troops with a hot spring nearby do this; most Japanese macaques have never seen one. In summer the same monkeys eat fruit, seeds, insects and more than two hundred kinds of plant.
Find it on the globe
Japanese macaque is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Why do some of them sit in hot springs?
To keep warm. The habit started with one troop at Jigokudani in the 1960s and spread because young monkeys copy what the older ones do. Most macaques in Japan live nowhere near a hot spring.
What do they eat when everything is frozen?
Bark, twigs, buds and evergreen leaves, plus seeds and roots dug out from under the snow. It is poor food, so the monkeys move slowly and huddle together to save energy.
Are they dangerous to people?
They are wild animals and can bite, above all where visitors feed them. In the parks that protect them the rules are simple: offer no food, and do not stare into a monkey’s eyes, because a hard stare is a threat.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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