Punch-kun’s Passion: The two foreigners who were arrested for intruding into the monkey mountain were blamed all over the world for the “mysterious incident that followed.

In broad daylight, in full view of the public.

It was a bright and sunny Sunday afternoon. Many people were visiting the monkey mountain at the Ichikawa Zoo and Botanical Garden in Chiba Prefecture, hoping to catch a glimpse of the popular baby monkey, Punch-kun. In addition to families with children, many foreign tourists were also there.

Suddenly, a person wearing a blue stuffed animal and an emoji-like character headdress climbed over the fence and jumped down several meters onto the grounds of the monkey mountain.

“What, are you serious? Maigatt!”

screamed the audience.

The impact of the fall upon landing caused the headgear to come off, exposing the face of the man, who turned out to be a foreigner. However, the man put on the headband again. He approached the monkey mountain with a stuffed animal that he had thrown in earlier. The monkeys were startled by the intruder and panicked. They fled to the top of the mountain, running left and right.

The monkeys fled and the man, wandering around helplessly, put the stuffed animal in a corner of the property. Did he break in to give it to Panchikun? Then a keeper came and took the man away without any sign of resistance. It happened in less than two minutes.

On May 18, the Ichikawa Police Station of the Chiba Prefectural Police Department announced the emergency arrest of two suspects, Reed Junayi Deyson, 24, a self-proclaimed university student, and Neil Jabari Duane, 27, a self-proclaimed singer, on suspicion of obstruction of business.

At around 11:00 a.m., the Ichikawa Zoo and Botanical Garden called 110 and said, “A foreign man jumped into the monkey mountain in the garden,” and the police rushed to the scene. The suspect, Dyson, was wearing a costume and entered the monkey mountain, while the suspect, Duane, was filming the scene.

The two suspects denied the charges when questioned, saying that they did not want to answer and were not convinced by their arrest (Dason) and that they were not inside the fence (Duane),” said a reporter from a national newspaper.

The park is troubled by the restrictions

In response to the incident, the park expanded the restricted viewing zone on the monkey mountain by one meter. A net was also installed to prevent intrusion.

The zoo is a facility for everyone to enjoy, and in order for that to happen, the animals must be healthy and the zookeepers must be able to do their jobs properly. We are extremely disturbed by this act of endangering the health of the animals and the safety of the zookeepers. We will consider various measures to prevent such an incident from happening again,” said Takashi Yasunaga, manager of the Ichikawa Zoo and Botanical Gardens Division.

In February of this year, Punch-kun became very popular after the park posted a picture of him carrying around a stuffed orangutan (a.k.a. Orang-mama), which served as his mother, on SNS. 90,000 people visited the park in March, nearly four times as many as the previous year, and 65,000 people visited in April, also three times as many.

Although Panchi-kun has gradually become more accustomed to the troop and rarely walks with Orang-mama anymore, many people were still visiting the monkey mountain in May. Panchi is also popular overseas, attracting many foreign tourists. The problem of “overtourism” has also arisen, he said.

There are some people who don’t have good manners,” he said. We ask visitors to stay in the front row for no more than 10 minutes and to bend over so that others in the back can see, but some people do not follow these rules, which sometimes causes trouble. Some groups of monkeys startled others by yelling at the top of their lungs.

It is said that the bipedal macaques feel stress from being made loud noises and from being watched by people for long periods of time. In some cases, the stress of one monkey in a troop can spread to the entire troop. The park has taken various measures, such as establishing restricted zones and calling out etiquette slogans on placards solicited from social networking sites, but they probably did not anticipate that someone would invade the monkey mountain,” said a writer who has interviewed Punch-kun.

The suspect Dason was dressed up as a character apparently used to promote a virtual currency called “meme coin. On his Instagram page, a photo was posted the day before the incident of a person posing as this character at a scramble crossing in Shibuya.

Since this photo was also posted on the official X account of this meme coin, it is believed that Dyson is the suspect involved. An image of a character handing a stuffed animal to a monkey, which appears to have been created by an AI, was also posted, although it has already been deleted.

Dason and his colleagues’ barbaric behavior has been reported overseas and has drawn condemnation from around the world. It is only natural that the customers had to pay for their “prank.