There are several stark differences between life in the city and rural living. One of the biggest is the availability of emergency services. In the city, an ambulance or a fire truck is generally only a few minutes away. In the country, sometimes you have to solve a problem for yourself because help just can’t reach you fast enough.
That rugged, rural necessity of self-reliance was put to the test in Japan’s countryside when an unusual varmint problem threatened to get out of control.
In the U.S., farmers generally worry about gophers and the like going after their crops. Japanese farmers have similar issues, but with monkeys.
To be sure, gophers can cause some havoc on a farmer’s field but monkeys are another matter entirely.
In Japan’s Fukui Prefecture, monkeys have been giving farmers headaches since about 2015, raiding crops for onions, eggplants, soybeans, and potatoes. Locals have tried things like anti-monkey netting and scarecrows but so far, the monkeys have proven too clever for either measure.
And so a trio of grandmothers have banded together to form a group fighting back against the monkeys and they call themselves the “Monkey Busters.”
No, really. After attending a course on repelling monkey raids in a neighboring community, the three grandmothers, Masako Ishimura (74), Tatsuko Kinoshita (68), and Miyuki Ii (67), have stepped up to keep their town and crops safe from the mischievous monkeys.
And no surprise, they’re becoming sort of celebrities in their own right.
Armed with air rifles, the Monkey Busters are known to drop everything when reports of a monkey raid come in.
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They’ll show up on the scene still wearing their aprons from doing house work, ready to fight off the invaders.
Locals say that the monkeys adapted somewhat to attempts to scare them off.
Where the monkeys might once have rushed en masse in a 20-strong group, they now split up into groups of four or five, which makes them more difficult to repel.
However, the villagers have joined alongside the Monkey Busters as well, flinging firecrackers, waving farm implements like hoes, and yelling as loud as they can to scare off the monkeys.
So far, the efforts of the Monkey Busters have proven effective.
With the grannies leading the way, attempts to repel the monkeys worked well enough that they disappeared for a while. However, they started showing up again in mid July so the Monkey Busters will be in action for some time yet.
It is, however, a necessity. “There are many elderly people in the Miyama area, and the cultivation of fields is indispensable for health and vitality. It is necessary for the area to continue working together in the future,” Ishimura said.
h/t: Fukui Shimbun
