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Yakushima NP, Kagoshima
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In Han-yama, deer often feed beneath macaques in the trees, eating fruits and leaves the monkeys knock down. Researchers recorded this unexpected feeding link between Seibu Rindo’s two familiar wild neighbors.
Researchers have recorded young macaques sitting on deer’s necks or hanging over their backs along the Seibu Rindo coast. Outside mating season, these occasional rides appeared to be play.
Seibu Rindo is the only road on Yakushima that runs through the World Natural Heritage area: about 15 kilometers of its roughly 20-kilometer length pass through the listed forest.
Researchers estimate that people settled around Han-yama and Kawahara around 1900. They farmed, made charcoal and distilled camphor; residents had left the western area by the 1960s.
In Kawahara, within the western forest area, 32.2 hectares were clear-felled for military purposes in the early 1940s. Researchers pieced together this history from local accounts and 1947 aerial photographs.
A 16-year forest-ownership lawsuit ended in 1920 with a conditional ruling that included a commitment to develop Yakushima’s coastal road. The final Nagata–Kurio link, now Seibu Rindo, was completed in 1967.
A plan to widen Seibu Rindo was dropped after local residents and researchers objected; a local guide dates the review to 1997–99. The road’s narrow character has a conservation story behind it.
At the road’s low elevations, chinquapin and evergreen-oak forest grew back after being used for fuel. Nearby, giant sea figs and banyans support bird’s-nest ferns high in their branches.
Researchers walked Seibu Rindo every August from 1999 to 2016, counting wild macaques. Sightings declined in some stretches, while high densities remained in the southern part of the park.
