Yes, the island is quite underdeveloped and would seem to at least offer a small primate plenty of places to remain hidden.

Japan has a long history of cryptids, and a surprisingly wide range of them, so you can be sure I’ll be pulling more of these rabbits out of my hat. I’m glad you enjoy them, and am pleased when you offer your good insights.

I looked up the island on Google Earth, naturally and was astonished at how undeveloped and beautiful it looked (there are lots of nice pics of the island’s scenery) and it’s big. 274 sq miles? That’s about 175,000 acres if it was flat, and as luscious as the jungle looked the beaches look even better.

Another thing I could see on Google Earth v.5 is that the submerged landscape indicates that this is not some recently emerged volcanic island arc but looks connected to the continental shelf and would have been somewhat connected to it with dry land in the past when sea levels were lower.

The notion of a nocturnal primate holding on within its island refugia, tonsured pate and all, is pretty intriguing.

When one goes back through the archives and learns about things like this, one really starts to wonder.

There is a gap, bigger than most people acknowledge, between “ethnoknown” and “confirmed by science.” This is a little more intriguing than I was thinking when I first checked in. Hmmmm.

Anyway, like I said, any prosimian, ape, or monkey on this island is a cryptid nevertheless.

Viergacht- Incidentally, lemurs that you mentioned are also prosimians and do have tapetum lucida. This makes your hypothesis interesting, but again, lemurs do not occur in the wild in Japan. They would be out of place lemurs, escaped or released exotics. Considering the long history of the Kenmun on the island, difficulty transporting these exotics, and the relatively small population of people there, I wonder just how likely it is that a breeding, undiscovered population of lemurs exist on the island. It’s something to consider, though.

I have some other thoughts on the monkey or ape hypothesis, besides the absence of any on Amami Oshima. One interesting detail often mentioned with Kenmun sightings is the presence of eye shine. Eye shine is caused by light reflecting off of a layer of tissue in the eye called the tapetum lucidum, which increases the amount of light hitting photoreceptors within the eye. It is typically a nocturnal adaptation for increasing vision in low light conditions. Indeed the Kenmun is clearly described as being nocturnal. The only primates currently known to have tapetum lucida and thus exhibit pronounced eye shine are nocturnal protosimians such as tarsiers.

Even if Japanese macaques had been introduced to the island from elsewhere, they are diurnal animals, not nocturnal ones, and also don’t have tapetum lucida that would cause the noticeable red eye shine often mentioned in Kenmun reports. The same would go for most other known primates.

For these reasons, I don’t think the answer is not so simple as saying Kenmun must just be apes. As you can see, if Kenmun are just apes, then they are strange, out of place ones, and so remain cryptids nevertheless.

Thanks!

The creature is said to be particularly fond of fish eyes, which it will pop out and eat with relish.

I suggest we set up a trail cam outside the store where they buy the relish!