Judging by the flushed faces, wrinkled skin and drooping eyelids, the bathers had clearly been wallowing in the thermal pool for hours. Their expressions were filled with blissful contentment, all signs of stresses and strains having been washed away by the soothing water.
It would be a common sight at spas across the globe, but this was no spa: it was the Jigokudani Monkey Park near Yudanaka in the Japanese Alps and we were watching a group of Japanese macaques – famously dubbed the snow monkeys – as they took their daily dip.
Although sharing a pool with a bunch of naked strangers may seem off-putting to many foreigners, soaking in an onsen hot bath is something of a national pastime for the Japanese and it seems the country’s primates are no exception. Legend has it that Yudanaka’s monkeys, who endure winter temperatures as low as -15°, first discovered the delights of the area’s natural springs in the 1960s, when a local hotel owner started leaving food out for them. A dedicated pool at Jigokudani was built several years later when humans grew tired of sharing baths with their furry cousins and the park is now home to a troop of some 200 individuals.
As an avid photographer I had been keen to visit for years, but the journey isn’t an easy one, involving a two-hour bullet train ride from Tokyo, a fifty-minute trip on the local branch line, a taxi ride and a two-kilometre hike through the snowy forest. As result, the park is relatively crowd-free and we found ourselves almost completely alone with the monkeys.
Armed with a stash of memory cards, we started snapping away as our subjects nodded off in the steaming pools, their wet fur creating an eclectic range of spiked hairstyles. While the adults dozed, the youngsters amused themselves nearby by play-fighting and rolling snowballs. There was little call for zoom lenses as we were able to creep within feet, though I was quickly greeted with a fierce display of hissing and teeth-baring when I ventured too close to a particularly large male.
By early afternoon most members of the troop had tired of bathing. Dripping, they hauled themselves lazily out of the pool and stretched out on a nearby rock to dry their coats in the wintry sunshine. The atmosphere was calm, the serenity broken only by the occasional bout of squawking as the monkeys jostled for the most sought-after lounging spots.
By five o’clock, our fingers were numb from the cold, the memory cards were full and the monkeys were beginning to scamper into the trees where they spend their nights. As we headed back down the forest trail we decided it was time to take a cue from the relaxed attitude of our new primate friends and overcome our Western self-consciousness. It was time to try an onsen for ourselves.
