Life In Japan: Monkey Attack!

In all the years I lived in America, I can honestly say I never had what happened to me this morning ever occur even once. Not in Michigan, Florida, Oregon. Not even in California, where there are no limits on the craziness.

My wife and I were finishing breakfast this morning and when we looked out the back window on the forest that is adjacent to our property, there was a MONKEY!

I know the photo makes it look like it’s watching TikTok on an iPhone, but he was actually munching on a potato he got from someone. Maybe us?

While usually such sightings are quite rare, monkeys are very much a part of the “fabric of like” here. Let me elaborate.

Understand that they can be very troublesome. Several monkeys can wipe out an entire garden in one raid, the veggies it took two or three months to grow. At the same time, our city officials don’t want to mercilessly eliminate them. After all, before we humans came along, this was their land. They are part of the eco-system here that has thrived for millennia.

We have five groups of monkeys — groups are extended families or communities — A through E. Group D is the most aggressive, or as we humans might say, the one that shows the most initiative. The groups are dispersed throughout the area, but it’s Group D that makes its presence felt around our house. Lucky us!

The monkey groups are tracked by the city government. There are chips inserted in members of each group. When possible, the city lets us know when a raiding party is moving in on a particular location.

Citizens report sightings as well. Right after we saw the monkey this morning, I alerted a neighbor, a gentleman who serves as the unofficial monkey policeman. Immediately, another neighbor phoned a report into City Hall. Our own monkey sheriff grabbed some fireworks launchers — these are hand-held tubes that fire a round of three explosive charges high into the air — and he set them off. The explosions are very loud, but I have a suspicion the monkeys are used to them and just ignore them.

It was community work day, so I left to work. While I was cutting weeds around our village shrine . . .

. . . my wife Masumi had two more visits by our encroacher.

I can’t blame the monkey. It’s spring and there is an inviting assortment of vegetables growing all around to select from. Time to catch up on eating after the sparse winter months.

As I’ve often said, the excitement never lets up here!

Do you doubt it?

[ This originated at the author's personal website . . . https://jdrachel.com ]

Life In Japan: Monkey Attack! | John Rachel

Life In Japan: A rose is a rose is an onion . . .

I was trying the other day to imagine what went through my mind when I was 25. It’s both a difficult and amusing exercise.

It requires erasing a lot of experience, history, knowledge, wisdom, joy and pain — maybe ‘ignoring’ is a better term — and seeing what sparse caricature of reality is left to assemble into a marginally coherent view of the world, recognizing that “hindsight” is still at play here, sabotaging the mechanics of memory.

It also requires recalling — painful and even embarrassing as it might be — what dreams and expectations I entertained at the time, as immature and undeveloped as I was.

I can’t say I came up with anything very interesting or startling. One thing I can assert with absolute certainty . . .

I never imagined I would at this stage in my life be living in Japan growing onions in my modest garden!

Not that I have anything against onions. On the contrary, onions are spectacular! They have a lot of symmetry and are about as essential as it gets in the kitchen.

It’s just that at 25 I was still living in my home state of Michigan. And I was more pre-occupied with exhaust fumes than fertile soil or keeping monkeys from stealing me blind. True, I was no longer in Detroit. And 25-years-of-age was post-university. But avoiding the exhaust fumes of pompous college professors had replaced avoiding the exhaust fumes of automobiles and factories.

Anyway here I am. And I’m a “proud papa”! Just look at this fine specimen . . .

Yes, a lot has happened over the many years, and a lot has changed. So my life is not just about vegetables. I write novels and unique — some would say eccentric — creative non-fiction books. More importantly, much of my focus these days is on political activism, specifically anti-war activism. You can get the flavor of my efforts HERE and HERE.

Oh . . . one last thing. The inspiration for the title of this article was Gertrude Stein. Here is the story from Wikipedia: “The sentence ‘Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose’ was written by Gertrude Stein as part of the 1913 poem Sacred Emily, which appeared in the 1922 book Geography and Plays.” As if you didn’t already know that.

[ This originated at the author's personal website . . . https://jdrachel.com ]

Life In Japan: A rose is a rose is an onion . . . | John Rachel