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There’s a lot to love about the Japanese aesthetic, but one of my favorite elements is their cultivation of pleasantly surprising incongruity. In other words, the Japanese have an appreciation for the absurd…and what could be more absurd than a monkey in a hot tub?
The Jigokudani Monkey Park was our first stop on an eight-day visit to Japan this
month, and it set the bar pretty high for the rest of the trip. We traipsed
through snowy woods near the town of Yudanaka (about 45 minutes by train from
Nagano) to find nearly 200 macaque monkeys alternately digging in the snow for
seeds and resting their furry bodies in a steaming hot spring.
For the most part, they completely ignore the tourists
shoving telephoto lenses in their faces. Someone discovered the monkeys’
high-altitude hangout in the 1960s, and humans have been flocking to see them
bathe ever since. It was tough to tear ourselves away from watching their weird
faces, but fortunately we had our own hot baths, cold saké, and mountain
vegetable tempura to look forward to at the nearby ryokan (traditional inn).
