Interaction studies in Japanese primatology: their scope, uniqueness, and the future.

Abstract

This paper aims to review social interaction studies in Japanese primatology, in order to introduce their utility into the current framework of primatology and their potential for understanding primate sociality. In the first part, I introduce some of the achievements in the field of Japanese primatology. It is a well-known fact that Japanese primatology, in its initial phases, strongly focused on society and sociality in nonhuman primates with respect to human society and sociality. Although Jun'ichiro Itani's theory on the evolution of social structure significantly influenced some of the Japanese primatologists, it had a comparatively minor impact on the West. As Itani himself admitted, he only treated the so-called "hardware" of society and did not deal with its "software" comprehensively, although he understood its importance and even provided some insightful ideas. In the latter part of the paper, I introduce some of the studies that directly dealt with the social interactions of primates and that were written mostly in Japanese. As compared to works in standard primatology, many of these papers were descriptive. This is because interaction cannot be decomposed into individual behaviors; thus, we have to focus on interaction itself. Finally, I argue that we need to explore the methodology for describing the lively and dynamic aspects of primate sociality.