The Aggressive Monkeys of Ruridera

Heather, Sue and I decided to go to Ruridera quite by accident. Last week, I brushed against some flyers at the bus station and knocked them over. When I went to pick them up, I noticed they had some cute cartoons of things to do around Himeji, so I kept a copy for myself. Later that week at school, I pulled it out of the bottom of my bag and noticed a cute little monkey on the map. I asked the teacher next to me what that site was and she told me it was Ruridera temple where you could feed the monkeys! That was all I needed to hear! I sent a text message to Heather to ask her to ask her extremely helpful teachers how we could get to Ruridera. Aa always, her teachers came through with a detailed bus schedule.

We headed to Ruridera on Saturday, on a much longer and more expensive bus excursion than we had expected, but it was well worth it. Ruridera is a Buddhist temple complex in a very small town about an hour and a half northwest of Himeji. The temple buildings were beautiful, but we were the ONLY people there. Very eerie!

For some reason, the denuded mountainside at the Buddhist temple seemed a bit of a contradiction to me.

Notice the Winnie the Pooh (called "Pooh-san" here) as an offering next to this statue. I think this statue is of Jizo, who is a favorite Japanese Buddhist saint - the patron saint of infants who died.

After wandering around the temple complex for a while, we hiked up the mountain a bit to the monkey (Japanese Macaque) feeding area. Heather had very unwisely brought a bunch of bananas along as a snack for herself, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the monkeys were very interested. They became more and more aggressive, especially since we weren't able to buy the regular monkey food they were used to humans feeding them. They kept swiping at her bag of bananas and one starting growling! Heather freaked out and sacrificed the bananas for her own personal safety (considering we were halfway up a mountainside and completely alone), and we hightailed it down the mountain. The moral of the story is obvious - "Don't bring bananas to a monkey feeding area". The rest of the photos from the day are on a Picassa web album. Enjoy at your leisure. http://picasaweb.google.com/sarainjapan/Ruridera