interesting comment on the western diet about half-way down.

By JAMES BROOKE

IKKO, Japan  $Bc`G  (BAt a mountain highway rest stop, tourists were
browsing in a
souvenir shop and lining up to ride a red-topped gondola to a snowy peak.
Suddenly, word spread through the parking lot: a robbery.

An intruder had jumped through the open door of a car and was
rummaging through
the interior.

Finally, the car owner offered some acceptable loot: a ripe banana. With
razor-sharp incisors slicing through peel and fruit, the Japanese monkey
bounded off.

"There is one monkey that will sit in the road, betting that the car
will stop,
then he will jump on the hood and demand food," said Tomoaki Matsuo, a
freelance television reporter who makes his living filming monkey
encounters in
this resort town 75 miles north of Tokyo. Others try to jump through open
windows of cars moving at close to 20 miles an hour. "The cars almost
get into
accidents," he said.

Monkeys are spreading across Japan, a tidy, cement-trimmed nation more
commonly
associated with bullet trains than wildlife. From a scraggly postwar population
of 15,000, the number of monkeys has increased tenfold in half a century,
reaching 150,000 today. In contrast, Japan's human population, loath to
reproduce, is expected to drop by half this century, to 65 million.

"If people just let the monkeys reproduce themselves, Japan would be the
archipelago of the monkeys in 2200," said Kunio Watanabe, a professor of
primate sociology at Kyoto University. "But I don't think that
Japanese are
that patient."

Inter-primate harmony is fraying in this town, abutting Nikko National Park,
where officials print pamphlets showing the year by year territorial
advance of
monkeys from park homeland. Some mothers now drive their children to
school for
fear of monkey attacks. Two years ago, Nikko became the first town in
Japan to
ban the feeding of monkeys.

"It just gets worse and worse," complained Toki Kaneda, 60, a resident
of the
Chuzenji Lake section who closed her souvenir store because of monkey theft.
"We haven't been able to leave the windows of our second-floor rooms
open for
years."

Increasingly, officials demonize monkeys as "pests" that "infest" farmland,
causing at least $7 million crop damage a year. Nationwide, the Asahi Shimbun
newspaper estimates, the number of monkeys killed by humans has soared
over the
last 25 years to about 10,000 a year today.

Nevertheless, like coyotes in the United States, monkey numbers in
Japan keep
increasing. With monkey bands moving from mountain areas to farm
areas, their
diet has improved, allowing most adult females now to have one baby a year.

"Is it possible to give them birth control?" Akiko Domoto, governor of Chiba
prefecture, asked in an interview, noting that Hong Kong was starting this
spring to capture and sterilize male monkeys. "I love monkeys, but as governor
I have to do something."

Japanese monkeys are becoming bigger and more aggressive because of their
Western diets, complains Teruo Kanaya, a 60-year-old Nikko hotelier.
By rooting
through garbage bags or extorting food from tourists, he said, "they have
gotten bigger from 20 to 30 years of eating Western food, McDonald's, greasy,
fatty food."

The monkey population explosion reflects changes in Japanese society, including
the decline of hunting and farming. In 1960, a quarter of Japan's work force
were farmers. Today, fewer than 5 percent are.

"Monkeys are moving into areas that are abandoned, where there are no farmers,
no dogs," said Hidenori Kusakari, Japan conservation director for the World
Wide Fund for Nature.

Farmers who stay behind often wonder if they are growing vegetables
only to
provide monkeys with buffet salad bars. A new book, "Protecting
Mountain Fields
>From Monkeys," contains the latest in anti-monkey technology, including
electric fences and 12-foot-high nets.

Not only has the number of Japan's hunters receded to 1960's levels,
but an
increasingly urban population looks aghast at hunting monkeys.
Families of
hunters suffer social ostracism. Children get teased at school if
their fathers
are known to be "monkey killers."

Still, rural villages sometimes post bounties of up to $1,000 for the
leader of
a particularly destructive monkey troop. In cities, sensational news reports
about monkeys "molesting women and children" have stirred police
officers to
form monkey posses, patrolling streets with nets and bananas tied to poles.