Recent years have seen the number of tourists – the vast majority of them non-Japanese – rise sharply, sometimes totalling 3,000 to 4,000 a day, a park official told AFP, declining to be named.
“We have been seeing incredibly long queues of visitors waiting outside the ticket booth. To ease that, we will have them buy tickets in advance” online, the official said.
The shift toward an online booking system will start in August, with a possible cap of 2,000 people a day.
As the number of tourists snowballed, so did instances of bad behaviour, such as trying to feed or touch the monkeys.
Some have even “tried to bathe” together with the animals, the official said.
